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UNIVERSE

LIKRARY

JOHN JACOB ASTOR

BOOKS BY

ARTHUR D. HOWDEN SMITH

BIOGRAPHIES

JOHN JACOB ASTOR
LANDLORD OF NEW YORK

COMMODORE VANDERBILT
AN EPIC OF AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT

NOVELS

HATE

living saga of the high seas”

PORTO BELLO GOLD

JOHN JACOB A5TC31

LANDLORD OF NEW YORK

ARTHUR D. HOWDEN SMITH

Wirzr I6 ILLUSTRATIONS

PHILADELPHIA & LONDON
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
1929

PRINTED IN THE
UNITED STATES
OF AMERICA

FIRST EDITION

VICTOR MORAWETZ

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE

A VENTURE IN FLUTES
Page XX

BOOK TWO
THE FOREST RUNNER
Page 37

BOOK THREE
FUR AND TEA
Page 65

BOOK FOUR

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE
Page 127

BOOK FITE
THE FIRST TRUST
Page 191

BOOK SIX

THE LANDLORD OF NEW YORK
Page 253

ILLUSTRATIONS

John Jacob Astor jrontispece

Portrait by Gilbert Stuart of John Jacob Astor 20

By the middle ^go^s New York was commencing to
dribble across Warren Street into the Ids'penard
Meadows 6l

The Pagoda anchorage at Wham/poa 84

The Hong factories at Canton 96

John Jacob Astor (from an old engraving) 120

McDougal and Stuart with six lesser wights pursu-
ing the Tonguin 146

Thom lost his chief mate and seven men attempting
to recormoiter a passage of the breakers 1 50

Manuel Lisa 160

Astoriay as it was in 1813 174

William B. Astor — the worldJs richest man three
quarters of a century ago 210

The American Fur Company's trading post at Mack-
inac. The lower view shows the fort-like plan
of the building 216

Junction of Broadway and Bowery Roady about 1828 256

ILLUSTRATIONS

Broadway from the Bowling Greeny 1828 262

The As tor House. The building on Broadway be-
tween Vesey and Barclay Streets was started in
1834 '2-T2.

The Headquarters of all the Astor interests in the

time of John Jacob Astor 278

BOOK ONE

A VENTURE IN FLUTES

When the gaudy regiments of the German Allies crossed
from the Brooklyn shore after the battle of Long Island
in August, 1776, and paraded up Broadway with their
British comrades-in-arms, they brought with them one,
who, indirectly, was to have a more important influence
upon the sleepy, little city and the country which had only
just been born, than any other in the glittering column
pressing relentlessly in pursuit of Washington’s beaten
battalions. None of the Germans’ swaggering officers,
neither von Knyphausen nor von Riedesel nor blustering
Colonel Rail, who should die gloriously after erring
tragically, was to play so vital a part upon the world’s
stage. For that matter, no Britisher there present, not
even fat, pleasure-loving Sir William Howe, himself, was
to do as much toward shaping the future of the sturdiest
of the British Lion’s whelps as a certain stocky, fair-haired
peasant named Heinrich Astor, who clung precariously to
a sutler’s wagon in rear of ffie Hessian contingent.

This youth of twenty-two — who pronounced his name
in such a fashion that for years afterward it was spelled,
by himself, as well as by others, Ashdour — ^never carried
a gun in battle or risked so needlessly the exceedingly
healthy physique nature had provided him. His service
as a tool of destiny was to consist in the writing of letters,
crude, ungrammatical letters, but sufficiently instinct with
life to tempt after him a greater: his younger brother,
John Jacob, already chafing, as he had chafed, against the
hide-bound routine of a German village, under the restric-
tion of a father imsympathetic and intemperate.

The father, likewise named John Jacob, was a butcher
by trade, and had taught his craft to Heinrich. Heinrich

14. JOHN JACOB AST OR

had no fault to find with butchering as a livelihood, but he
considered the community in which they dwelt too small
to afford opportunity for the pair of them, so, when the
Prince of Hesse beat up for conscripts for the expedition
to America, he left home and secured employment in the
sutler’s train. It was the only way he knew of securing
free passage to the one land the Eighteenth Century af-
forded where a poor man might hope to alter the scope of
his endeavor. The fact that he embarked for this land as
an enemy in no wise affected his unimaginative German
phlegm. He was, after all, going to America because he
wanted to be an American. That was enough for him, and
it should be enough for anyone else. Generally speaking,
it was, although occasionally, in times to come, people
would say unkind things, which seldom bothered Hein-
rich’s sensibilities. That was one of the advantages of fol-
lowing the butcher’s trade. A man couldn’t afford to have
tender feelings if he was a butcher, and Heiimich was a
very successful butcher.

Of the 29,166 men who served in the German con-
tingents during the war he alone profited lastingly by
the experience — ^unless you take account of the stay-at-
home Princes, who rented out their troops to George III
at a gross sum of £850,000 a year, including hand-money,
blood-money and incidental charges. By some hook or
crook, he amassed sufficient funds to set up as a minor con-
tractor of meats soon after the British occupied New York,
and in succeeding years became middleman for the raid-
ing parties — ^De Lancey’s Royal Americans, Brunswick
Jaegars, Queen’s Dragoons — ^that forayed the Westches-
ter farms. Somebody had to market the cattle and pro-
duce lifted so ruthlessly from a rebellious population, and
why should Heinrich forego the chance to augment his
business? It wasn’t easy work. There was as much labor
in butchering a seized rebel beef as in butchering the most
loyal bull that ever bellowed. An unanswerable argument!

It is a tribute to his character that despite his known

A VENTURE IN FLUTES 15

record diiring the war he became genuinely popular in
the city. The old saw about success applies here, o£ course.
Heinrich possessed the same instinct for the right ven-
ture that distinguished his younger brother, even though he
lacked the miraculous quality which moved Philip Hone
to exclaim of the second Astor to reach the New World:
“All he touched turned to gold, and it seemed as if for-
tune delighted in erecting him a monument of her unerr-
ing potency.” But people liked Heinrich. There was
something ruggedly sincere about him. If he wasn’t a
Patriot in '“the days that tried men’s souls,” he could
scarcely be blamed, who had been born in a foreign land
and crossed the ocean with a hostile army. At least, he
became an American citizen as soon as possible after the
peace.

So much for Heinrich. You shall meet him again, but
he enters these pages simply because he left a younger
brother behind him in the sleepy village of Waldorf,
some eight miles from Heidelberg, to whom, as has been
said, he wrote letters describing the marvelous possibili-
ties of this America, where a petty tradesman might mak;e
of himself whatever he would.

A good butcher, Heinrich. But a better letter-writer —
which must have seemed as inexplicable to himself as it
does to you and me.

Waldorf — Wald Dorf, “The Village in the Wood” —
was one of seven villages on the fringes of the Black
Forest, dotting the ancient Roman road which runs south
from Spires toward Italy. It was a plain, primitive place,
more rural than its proximity to the university town of
Heidelberg might indicate. The Astors had been settled
there for three generations, the great-grandfather of
young Jacob having fled from France to Lutheran Ger-
many after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes made
their homeland intolerable for the French Protestants.

1 6 JOHN JACOB AST OR

And the descendants of the exile would have us believe
that he was a gentleman of quarterings and seignorial
ancestry, no less, indeed, than Jean Jacques d’Astorg,
great-grandson of Joseph d’Astorg, Marquis de Roquepin,
whose grandfather, in turn, had been Antoine d’Astorg,
Baron de Monbartier in the Haute Garonne, twelfth in
line from Pierre d’Astorg, Seigneur de Noaillac in Limou-
sin, who could trace his lineage to Pedro d’Astorga, a
knight of Castile, who fell at the taking of Jerusalem in
in 00. The name of this dim Spaniard, according to legend,
came from a grant of arms conferred upon him by a
Spanish Queen: a falcon, argent, on a gloved hand, or — a
play on a Spanish word for goshawk, azor.

Whether this pretty story be true or not, there seems
to be no doubt that a Frenchman with a name which soon
became Ashdor or Ashdour or Ashtor or Astor, under
the guttural pronunciation of South Germany, did leave
France in the year 1685, and after a period of wandering,
in the course of which he acquired a knowledge of Italian
and German, reached Waldorf, and there married in 1692
Fraulein Anna Margaretha Eberhard. In the dubious
traditions of a family which has always had a fantastical
craving for the outward trappings of gentility, this Jean
Jacques d’Astorg is represented as possessing the means
to pose as a small landowner or squire, a position his chil-
dren clung to after his death in 1711 at the age of forty-
seven. Biut by the time his grandson, John Jacob, entered
the world, in the year 1724, the best an Astor could hope
for in Waldorf was an honest living earned by the sweat of
his brow, and John Jacob, parent of the subject of this
biography, was duly apprenticed to the butcher’s trade.

A figure almost as dim as Pedro d’Astorga, the Cas-
tilian, this elder John Jacob. We know that he was lusty
of body, optimistic of temper, a lover of festivities, a
stout trencherman and a notable harrier of the bowl. We
know, too, that he had the wit to marry on July 8, 1750,
Maria Magdalena Vorfelder, a conscientious, thoughtful

A VENTURE IN FLUTES 17

woman, whose character was to achieve a durable impres-
sion upon their son, who was to make of their obscure name
a household word. And finally, we know that he was im-
provident, lazy and selfish, at least, when in drink j and
that none of his children liked or respected him, his four
sons quitting his roof as soon as each was able to, and his
two daughters marrying at the earliest opportunity. We
know that after the death of his hard-working wife, an
event which occurred when young John Jacob was atraut
fourteen years old, he lost no time in presenting a step-
mother to his children, a woman they detested. But that
sums up our knowledge.

The old butcher lived to the grand age of ninety-two,
dying in Waldorf in 1816, after his son had plumbed the
full measure of success. What did he think of the boy
he had thwarted and hindered? Had he any perception
of the prank of Destiny which made him father of a
prodigy? Did he realize the glamor which should cluster
aroxmd his name? Did he grasp the significance of Astoria?
Could he comprehend the true role of the fur trade?
When he looked at the cheap, colored print of New York
City, hung on the wall of his parlor, could he glimpse,
shadowy above the tree-tops, a barrier of towers such as
the world had never seen? My guess is that he mumbled
his pipe-stem and grumbled to the neighbors because John
Jacob didn’t make him a more generous allowance — ^he
never had any luck with his boys. Achy du lieberl

George Peter, the eldest, born in I752j had flitted first.
A musical lad, George. He emigrated to London and se-
cured employment with an unde, one of the butcher’s
brothers, who was a partner in the prosperous firm of
Astor & Broadwood, musical instrument-makers, and under
the name of Broadwood, still a factor in the piano indus-
try. Heinrich, the second son, born in»i754, we have met
already. Perfectly willing to be a butcher, as George was
not, Heinrich rebelled at butchering in Waldorf. So chd
John Melchior, the third son, five years junior to Hein-

1 8 JOHN JACOB AST OR

rich. One Spring morning after Heinrich’s leave-taking
John Melchior vanished, and when next heard of was
learning a trade in a distant city.

This left young John Jacob, who was thirteen years
old in that mystic year of ’76 — ^he was born July 17, 1763
— alone to assist his father, and John Jacob was soon very
unhappy. A good student, eager to improve himself, he
acquired all the knowledge he could in the village-school,
which, like most similar institutions in Germany, was
superior to village-schools in other countries. His master
was a Huguenot refugee like his great-grandfather, a pro-
gressive, intelligent man, Valentine Jeune, who taught in
close co-operation with the Lutheran pastor, the Reverend
John Philip Steiner. Both preceptors thought well of
Jacob, as he was called, and encouraged him, so that by
the time he was ready for his First Communion at four-
teen, the age when schooldays were considered ended, he
could read and write with ease, cipher as far as the Rule of
Three, knew his catechism, prayer-book, and hymnal and
performed very fairly upon the flute. In other words,
he was remarkably well-educated for a peasant-lad in the
Eighteenth Century, much better-educated than most
poor boys in America.

In disposition he was kindly and affectionate, devoted
to his mother during her lifetime and to her memory
after she was gone, and from his earliest years particularly
fond of young children. Older people, as a rule, liked
him, but the unhappiness which preyed upon him after
his mother’s death tended to drive him away from the
company of his peers, and he developed morose tenden-
cies in no wise typical of him. It was reported of him at
this time, that is, during the period of his stepmother’s
rule, that he would absent himself from home for days,
sleeping in any corner he could find, even a straw-bed in
a neighbor’s barn. His father he held in contempt. The
two were quite inimical: old John Jacob with never a
thought for the road ahead or a care for anything he

A VENTURE IN FLUTES 19

could not seej young John Jacob furiously discontented
with his present lot, and curious of all the stirring events
boiling in the outer world.

Yet he was no ninny-come-nanny, this blond peasant-
lad. Thick-thewed, with a barrel-chest and heavy limbs,
his muscles were developed by strenuous labor as his mind
was slowly developing under the impulsion of an alertly
inquisitive mentality. He liked to sit by and listen while
Pastor Steiner talked with Schoolmaster Jeune of the web
of Continental intrigues which momentarily threatened
war, and the implications of the vague struggle beyond
the Atlantic. There would be letters from brother
Heinrich, telling of this or that — ^the Americans were
beaten, they were not beaten, they were starving and
freezing to death, they had obliterated the Grenadier
Regiment Rail, there was talk of peace, there was talk
of war, the von Trumbach Regiment was for Canada,
no, the Brunswickers. The pastor and the schoolmaster
would read over the frayed letters Jacob brought them.
Letters from other homesick soldiers, too. Oddly enough,
these Hessians, whom the American soldiers were taught
to hate, more often than not evinced an uncanny sym-
pathy with the cause they had been sold to suppress. And
as one year slipped into another this feeling became more
tangible, especially amongst the younger men. Henrich
Astor sensed it. There was a thing called freedom. One
man was as good as another — ^if he deserved to be. No
more kings, no more nobles, a fair chance for all, the
people to rule themselves, a man to enter any business
he chose.

It seemed too good to be true. Pastor Steiner wagged
his head forebodingly. Freedom was a dangerous toy for
light heads. Kings had their heavenly purpose. Weren’t
they in the Bible? The Americans were a good people,
no doubt, but — ^And Valentine Jeune would flare into
rapid speech. If Kings were unjust they deserved no more
consideration than common people. And why couldn’t a

20 JOHN JACOB AST OR

nation govern themselves — as the Church governed itself,
say? This Washington, now, even the Great Frederick
spoke well of him. And the Declaration of Independence
was a dignified document, speaking for all self-respecting
men in its assertion of primary rights.

Jacob hugged his knees and listened. This was fascinat-
ing— and fat Heinrich was in the middle of what was
going on, over there in New York, a place where the
trees grew much bigger and thicker than in Waldorf,
where a mighty river flowed down to the sea and ships-
of-the-line might anchor under the very shore, and a boy
who was willing to work could become a rich merchant in
the course of time. He’d go home from one of these dis-
cussions, and try to talk to his father about it all, and the
butcher would curse him for his pains. What a fool boy!
Did he think the English King would fail to curb these
rebels? What? With all the High and Mighty and Serene
Princes lending him aid, the best troops in Europe. Ach,
what fool talk! Off with you. Eckholz will have that sow
of his butchered for his daughter’s wedding.

But in a year or so came more letters, telling of a
battle at a place none of them could twist their tongues
around. Saratoga! Was ever such a name? Thunder and
lightning! And the English beaten, yes, more than
beaten — captured! And thousands of good Germans with
them, Hesse-Hainau men, Hesse Cassel men, Bruns-
wickers, the great von Riedesel, himself.

This put a new aspect upon the talk. For the first time,
really, from end to end of Europe, men began to doubt
Britain’s invincibility. France, itching to avenge defeat in
the Seven Years War and redeem her prestige, conscious
that her Navy was in better fighting shape than ever it
had been, prepared to throw in her lot with the Colonists.
Wily, old Frederick the Great, who had taken the part of
the Americans from the commencement of the struggle,
allowed himself to become a trifle more partisan. The
Allied Princes wept and wrung their hands — and in-

A VENTURE IN FLUTES 21

structed their diplomatic agents in London and Han-
over to make certain the casualty reports were accurate
and obtain every last stiver due under the contracts of
indemnification.

George Peter, Jacob’s brother in London, wrote, too.
The City merchants were uneasyj the Opposition in Par-
liament criticized the Ministry severely} the Americans
were wiiming. Their privateers were scouring the seas.
Insurance was all but prohibitive. Even shipping to Ire-
land wasn’t safe. If things went on like this, what with
the French coming in, the war was as good as lost; and
if that happened there was no knowing what would fol-
low. Men who ought to know believed the Americans
would be bitter competitors for markets.

Jacob wrote to George Peter, wrote, also, to Heinrich.
Was he wrong to wish to emigrate? Had he a right to
expect a future overseas? The answers came, the first
after many weeks, the second after many months. By all
means, he should emigrate, advised George Peter, but why
go to America? Here in London work awaited a smart
German boy who had knowledge of music and was apt
with his hands. Come ahead, urged fat Heinrich in his
fat, stubby scrawl. A man makes twice as much butcher-
ing in New York as in Waldorf. But it would be well
to practise English. These people are very stupid at
languages.

Jacob canned both letters. Of course, he must know
English, but he could never learn it in Waldorf. London
was the place for that. His uncle had many German em-
ployees, who would make it easy for him. And after
London should come New York. A step at a time, that
was wisest — a policy he was to practise, life-long.

Wisely, then, he talked to Pastor Steiner and School-
master Jeune, pressing them to intervene in his behalf.
And between the three of them they dinted the stubborn-
ness of old John Jacob. Perhaps the boy should have a
chance to make more of his life, and to be sure, there

22 JOHN JACOB AST OR

wasn’t a future worth speaking of in butchering in Wal-
dorf, as Heinrich had said, scarcely enough work for two.
But he must wait another year. Next summer, when he
was sixteen. Perhaps. Let’s see how he feels then, eh?

And young Jacob was content. Why shouldn’t he have
been? The letters kept coming in. Not only from Hein-
rich, but from other German lads, including some of
those captured at Saratoga, who were actually living
amongst the Americans and discovering them to be agree-
able people, with very attractive daughters.

Ill

It was on a warm Spring day in 1779 that young John
Jacob left Waldorf, the equivalent of two dollars in his
pocket and a bundle of clothes slung from a stick across
his shoulder, his eyes blurred with tears. A knot of
friends and relatives escorted him to the end of the
cobbled street, where it joined the Roman road that
sliced through the green countryside as ruthlessly direct
as the spears of the legionaries who had first built a high-
way to the Rhine. His sisters wept; his father was sullen,
inclined to self-pity at the loss of the one remaining son;
the neighbors were envious or sorrowful, according to
their several dispositions. Only Schoolmaster Jeune was
cheerful and encouraging, joking at every opportunity,
rebuking the sour gossips, who shook their heads and pre-
dicted hunger and cold as the least evils awaiting the
wanderer.

It seemed to Jacob that the partings would never be
over. His father gave him a very damp, beery kiss on
either cheek, muttering something about remembering the
dead mother old John Jacob had forgotten quickly
enough. His sisters threw themselves convulsively into
his arms. There were more kisses and handshakes, mes-
sages for Hans in London and Lothar in that distant
New York, where the red Indians prowled the streets by
night and bears invaded the churches. Jacob was at the

A VENTURE IN FLUTES 23

breaking-point, and kindly Valentine Jeune spun him
around and gestured down the tree-bordered road.

“0£F with you, youngling. The good God keep you!”

So Jacob squared his shoulders, swallowed hard and
trudged oflF upon the first lap of his Odyssey. He heard
parting shouts, hysterical injunctions from his sisters, but
he dared not look back. That would have been to sur-
render all trace of dignity. He just trudged on, oblivious
to his surroundings, and as he disappeared beyond a rise
Valentine Jeune turned to the little group of villagers
and exclaimed:

‘T am not afraid for John Jacob. He’ll get through the
world. He has a clear head and everything right behind
the ears.”

Some of the Waldorfers agreed and some dissented.
Old John Jacob blubbered that there was nobody like his
boy, the sisters wept some more until Jeune comforted
them, and finally everyone dispersed. Young John Jacob
had had his turn at the center of the stage. And, indeed,
about that time he was feeling lonelier than ever — sit-
ting beside the road on a hill-top, whence he might see
the red tiles of the village roofs gleaming amongst the
trees, wiping his eyes dry, and as he recounted in after-
years, making three resolutions: “To be honest, to be in-
dustrious, and not to gamble” — ^two of which he most
certainly observed successfvilly. Himself, of course, he
believed that he observed all three. And possibly he did.
Honesty is largely a state of mind.

However that may have been, he rose refreshed and
consoled by his moral reflections, and tramped on. The
breeze was soft and warm, bearing the rich, sweet per-
fumes of the new life that was burgeoning imder the
touch of Spring. From the distant aisles of the Black
Forest, from every wayside farm and field, the lush odors
wafted to his nostrils. He sniffed them avidly, and forgot
to be sad. A carter hailed him, and was properly impressed
by his de,stin3itiQn, ^ wandering student jested with him._

24 JOHN JACOB AST OR

A batch of farmers shared bread and cheese at noontime.
Insensibly, he was blended with the pageant of the road.
If he no longer might lord it in the center of a stage,
yet he had acquired a part in an infinitely greater drama.
The very pulse of Germany throbbed under his dusty
boots, appealing to his imagination with an intimacy he
had never known diu'ing the cloistered years in Waldorf.

Reaching the Rhine, he experienced no difficulty in
obtaining employment upon one of the immense lumber-
rafts, which were floated downstream to the Netherlands
at this season of the year. And for the ensuing two weeks
he enjoyed an idyllic existence. In the daytime the raft’s
crew had little to do, except work the long sweeps to fend
off the river-craft or free their unwieldy charge from a
sand-bar. At sunset they tied up to the bank, kindled fires
ashore, and lounged on the grass, telling stories, singing
songs, listening to Jacob play the homemade flute he had
tucked in his clothes-bundle. The raft-master supplied
plenty of food, the weather was good and for all of them
the voyage was rather a holiday than a serious effort.

On the fourteenth day they bumped into the lumber-
wharves of Amsterdam, and Jacob was paid off, receiving
ten dollars, an enormous sum in his estimation, for the
two weeks. This enabled him to book passage in a North
Sea packet for London, and a few days later he was
walking gingerly through the bustling streets of the
English capital, inquiring his way to the quarters of
“Ashdour undt Pbroadtvoodt.” Somehow or other — ^he
never could remember how — ^he gaiqed his destination at
long last, and was ushered by a suspicious porter into the
presence of his brother, George Peter, who took one look
at the stocky, tousle-haired lad in ill-cut, patched gar-
ments, and snatched him to a Teutonic embrace.

The uncle was equally kindly, if less demonstrative.
There was employment for the boy, and George Peter
foimd him lodgings. And satisfied, beaming with pride,
Jacob promptly addressed himself to his two-fold task:

A VENTURE IN FLUTES 25

to leam to speak English, and to save the money to pay
his way to America. But this last ambition seemed im-
possible of attainment. English he acquired readily — ^he
could make himself understood after six weeks. To save
money wasn’t so easy. He worked hard, reporting at the
factory at five o’clock in the morning, and usually stay-
ing until evening} but his wages were small, living was
expensive, and despite his frugality, four years were re-
quired to put by $75 and the price of a good suit of
English clothes.

In the meantime, his uncle and George Peter urged
him to remain with them. He was willing, anxious to
please and they promised him advancement. But Jacob
matched his own observations with the letters Heinrich
wrote from New York, and concluded his earlier plan
was best. The most favorable opportunity in England
must be narrower than the chances America afforded the
emigrant. Whatever doubts clouded his mind were dis-
pelled by the news of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent
in September, 1783. He was now twenty, he had in hand
ample funds for the Atlantic voyage, and he resolved to
waste no more time in deliberation, so he hied himself
to the Pool, and applied to the first sailor he saw, one
John Whettin, mate of an unnamed American brig.

Whettin took a fancy to the German, and very consid-
erately advised that he take passage in another, and more
comfortable, vessel, skippered by Captain Jacob Stout.
Astor accepted the advice, and repaid Whettin years after-
ward by making the sailor master of one of his own mer-
chantmen. With Captain Stout, Jacob bargained for a
passage in the steerage, food to be provided the same as
the crew’s, for $25. This left $50 of the wanderer’s cap-
ital, and $25 was invested in the purchase of seven flutes,
which he obtained from his employers. Why on earth
he chose flutes for his first venture I don’t know, unless
it was that he figured on obtaining the American agency
for Astor & Broadwood products, and considered it good

26 JOHN JACOB AST OR

policy to establish relations with the firm at once. What-
ever his motive, it is amusing that a young man as intelli-
gent as he was should have fancied a market for musical
instruments in a country emerging from eight years of
war, and specifically, in a city which had suffered all the
stagnation of a protracted siege and was to be further
ruined by proscription and eviction. Yet the fact remains
that those seven flutes may be said to have constituted the
foimdation of the Astor fortune, and in the circumstances
you will be doubly entertained by the story of what hap-
pened to them.

In November Captain Stout sailed, perhaps the least
conspicuous of the ship’s company the fresh-faced Ger-
man lad in the steerage, who could boast for his worldly
possessions:

Item, $25 in English coin.

Item, the clothes he stood in.

Item, 7 flutes.

Item, r spare suit of clothes.

Item, an inquiring mind.

Item, a will to work.

Item, r healthy body.

You will observe that this inventory includes a number
of possessions in addition to those with which Jacob started
from Waldorf 5 but he hadn’t made any very substan-
tial progress in the four years. Probably, his best single
asset was his knowledge of English. His capital was
grotesquely insufficient. He would have to start all over
again. Indeed, he was already starting, pointing his nose
in the direction Destiny had plotted for him, although of
this he was entirely ignorant.

There were a number of Hudson’s Bay Company offi-
cers aboard, as well as a yoimg German, who had traded
independently with the Indians for furs. Jacob overheard
the Hudson’s Bay men discussing the fur trade with his
compatriot and became interested in so novel an enter-
prise. The voyage was long and stormy j the passengers

A VENTURE IN FLUTES 27

were thrown much together, and the two Germans had
their nationality in common. Jacob was fascinated by the
adventures of this man, little older than himself, who
had commenced trading on a small scale, then gradually
acquired capital, invested it in skins, taken them to
England, turned his profits into trade-goods, and was
now planning to repeat the operation. This was exactly
the sort of enterprise Jacob must try, if he was to suc-
ceed, and in the course of the voyage he was at pains to
learn the names of the different slans and their values,
in America and England; the names of the principal
dealers in Montreal, New York and London; how to buy,
preserve, pack and transport pelts; and how to deal with
the Indians. He was amazed to hear that in New York
it was possible to buy furs from river-boatmen on the
wharves for a handful of sweetmeats or a toy, furs which
would bring in London from five to ten times their value
in New York. And he stowed this information away in his
memory, with the private intention to turn it to account
at the earliest opportunity.

After a series of baffling head-winds, the ship made the
Capes of the Chesapeake toward the end of January,
1784, but the Bay was so full of ice that she could make
no progress to Baltimore for nearly two months. The
richer passengers soon became disgusted with the delay,
and landed over the ice; but Jacob couldn’t afford coach-
fare to Baltimore. Besides, he was being fed and lodged
without additional expense, and learning the details of a
fascinating new business, into the bargain. So he stayed
aboard and tucked away generous rations of hard-tack and
salt-horse, until the ice broke, and Captain Stout was able
to jockey the ship up to her berth, substantially the loser
by the members of his company who had taken full ad-
vantage of their passage-agreements.

From Baltimore Jacob took coach, in company with his
friend, the fur-trader, for New York, this journey wipmg
out what remained of his tiny capital. When he said

28 JOHN JACOB AST OR

good-by to his shipmate at the Battery pier, where the
Jersey ferry landed them, he had no more than a couple
of shillings left to rub against each other in his pocket.
He must find Heinrich, and at once, if he wouldn’t go
hungry — as the wiseacres of Waldorf had predicted.

Ah, but under one arm he carried a package containing
the seven flutes. His stock in trade. And he might hug
himself exultantly, walking up Broadway, staring at the
many negroes, and the broad tulip trees rattling their
branches overhead, and the free carriage of the people,
and cocking an ear to the ringing cries of the street-
vendors, offering their wares — ^“Here ye are! Niii-iice,
clean Rockaway saa-aand! Sand yer floors!” “Hot corn!
Hot corn!” “Greenwich spring- water, two cents a paa-
aail!” “Fresh straw! Throw out yer ticks! Fresh Jersey
straaaw!” — ^watching with envious eyes a boy sucking at
a pear lifted by the stem from the bowl of molasses in
which it had been stewed. He was in New York. He stood
on the threshold of Fortune.

There was never any question of Jacob’s starving or
lacking a roof. He was willing to work, and although
New York was poverty-stricken and down-at-heels in that
Spring of 1784, reduced in population, too, by the loss
of the Tory families that had fled with the British gar-
rison, work was available for all who sought it. And if
he hadn’t found work, still fat butcher Heinrich would
have stood by him. Heinrich was uproariously glad to see
“der kleine Bruder,” and Heinrich had prospered in a
small way. He boasted his own stall in the Fly Market
and had married a fine, bouncing wife, Dorothy, step-
daughter of John Pessenger, who held stall No. i in the
Market. The Pessengers were from Stone Arabia in Tryon
County, which then comprised the entire northwestern
part of the State, and I suspect that they were Palatines,
of the same general stock as the Astors.

A VENTURE IN FLUTES 29

Heinrich was tremendously proud of his pretty, young
wife — “Dolly wass der pink of der Powery,” he used to
say, according to De Voe’s quaint “Market Book,” which
enshrines a host of interesting facts and anecdotes relat-
ing to the city’s earlier tradesmen — ^no less proud of the
business he had established, unaided. Not even John
Jacob could work any harder than Heinrich. Up at dawn,
push a wheelbarrow to the Bull’s Head Tavern — ^the first
of that name, on the lower Bowery — ^resort of the dro-
vers, load his clumsy vehicle with as many carcasses as it
could carry and then trundle back to the market, where
he must prepare his cuts in time for the early-rising house-
wives, and be on hand during the day to wait upon all
and sundry. Tired at night? Yes. But his own master, and
tucking away shillings which some day should double and
triple themselves in sound bank-stock and real estate. He
was a saving fellow, was Heinrich, and quite satisfied with
his occupation. A butcher always knew exactly where he
was at. You chose your meats, you fixed a fair price, you
paid cash and demanded cash — and you coul^’t have
trouble.

In proof of which contention, he pointed to the growth
of his business. Really, he needed an assistant. Dorothy
helped all she could, but a stout lad like Jacob would
find plenty to do, and he’d pay a fair wage. But Jacob
repelled the suggestion. Hadn’t he fled Waldorf to escape
being a butcher? Anything but that! Besides, he didn’t
want to cling to his brother’s coat-tails. He had come to
the New World to seek an opportunity to strike out for
himself, and he intended to do so.

Heinrich took the answer in good part, and presented
Jacob to George Diederich, a German baker, in Queen
(now Pearl) Street, who required a helper. It was no part
of Jacob’s ambition to be a baker, but rather a baker than
a butcher during the interval while he familiarized him-
self with his new surroimdings and hunted something
better to do. And he threw himself cheerily into the work.

30 JOHN JACOB AST OR

which was as taxing as any he had done. Under the agree-
ment, Diederich boarded and lodged him, in addition to
a wage so slight as to be negligible. The ’prentice was
expected to help in the baking as well as the sales, and
in the forenoon either made deliveries or peddled trays
of cakes through the streets, adding his resonant tenor
voice to the medley of street-cries which was one of the
characteristics of old New York.

Jacob loathed this work, but he was amply rewarded
for the faithful diligence he put into it. At 8i Queen
Street, a few doors from Diederich, lived a widow, Mrs.
Sarah Todd. Mrs. Todd was a woman of excellent family,
related amongst others, to the Brevoortsj but she was in
reduced circumstances, and obliged to take in lodgers to
make both ends meet. Whettin, the seaman who had
befriended Jacob in London was a relative of hers by
marriage, and it may be that they met through him. At
any rate, Mrs. Todd had a daughter, also named Sarah,
several years younger than Jacob, a solid, substantial sort
of girl, who, like her mother, was more inclined to shift
for herself than depend upon the benevolence of rela-
tives. The young people became acquainted, and on Sun-
days, after church, of course, went walking under the
tulipKtrees and horse-chestnuts that made the Bowery
deserving of its name. Mrs. Todd liked the young Ger-
man, with his nice manners and serious ways. He was
less inclined to wildness than the American boys of his
age, many of whom had been in the army and were un-
settled by the experience or else had learned to ape the
profligacy of the British officers of the garrison. He had a
pretty taste for music, was decently religious and well
spoken of by his employer. A lad with a future, older
men said before he had been many weeks in the city.

For in those days everyone knew everyone else in New
York, and each addition to the population, however
humble, was discussed over the tea-cups from the Battery
to Warren Street, where the open fields stretched north

A VENTURE IN FLUTES 31

clear to the rocky heights of Harlem. So it was not to be
wondered at that the yellow-haired German boy, who
trotted up and down Broadway, balancing a tray of cakes
on one palm, bowing politely to the ladies and gentlemen
he recognized as patrons of Diederich’s shop, was early
singled out for observation. But Jacob was a cake-peddler
only a few weeks when Robert Browne, an elderly
Quaker fur-merchant, who lived near the Todds, offered
him a clerkship at two dollars a week and his board and
lodging. Here was exactly the opportunity he craved, and
he leaped to accept it. He’d learn the fur business.
Then

But “then” seemed a long way off in the summer of
1784. Jacob was called a clerk, but most of the work he
did consisted of beating the stored furs to keep the moths
out of them — camphor was too expensive for such use in
the Eighteenth Century. However, he worked so dili-
gently that his new employer was impressed, and in the
Fall sent him out of town to several near-by localities to
purchase skins from the local farmers. He bought so
wisely that in the Spring Browne dispatched him up the
Hudson into the Iroquois country, where the mighty Six
Nations preserved a shadow of the sovereignty which had
made them masters of the New York frontier for a
century.

This was the richest fur country within the bounds of
the state, but its richness was relative rather than absolute.
Even the counties adjacent to the city produced a substan-
tial crop of pelts annually, and should continue to do so
for many years to come. Skins still had an actual money-
value, heritage from the early Colonial days when they
passed as currency, and in the outlying settlements of the
frontier constituted as valid wealth as coined silver. Fur-
thermore, the interruption of the fur-trade during the
Revolution had enhanced the price of furs abroad, so
that this was one business which picked up very rapidly

32 JOHN JACOB AST OR

after the suspension of hostilities. Jacob’s employer could
sell furs as fast as the trappers traded them in.

There was danger as well as hardship for the American
fur-trader in the country of the Long House. The British,
in defiance of the Treaty of Ghent, retained the military
posts at Detroit, Michilimackinac, Oswego, Ogdensburg,
Niagara, Iron Point, and Dutchman’s Point on Lake
Champlain, a chain which barred the Americans from the
whole vast area south of the Great Lakes and enabled the
occupants to dominate the Six Nations, who had been
divided by the Revolution and were inclined to be hostile
to Americans, a feeling skilfully nourished by the British
military officers, naturally bitter over the outcome of the
War and anxious to do everything they could to make
things difficult for the new nation. It was necessary for
Jacob to operate surreptitiously. He must feel his way
carefully, approaching only villages of savages who cher-
ished no grievances for the bloody devastation wrought
upon several of the tribes by General Sullivan and gal-
lant, old Marinus Willett. And with a sixty-pound pack
on his back and a rifle over his shoulder, he must tramp
twenty miles a day in the wilderness, and have his wits
about him when he approached a group of lodges at the
journey’s end.

He was extraordinarily successful. With typical German
thoroughness, he was at pains to learn all he could of the
Indian dialects, their customs, whimsies, and peculiarities.
He discovered that they were fond of music, and more
than once with the trills of his flute soothed a sour-visaged
Seneca or Mohawk, who thought of lifting a blonde scalp
in revenge for some dan-brother lost at Oriskany or on
the Sacandaga. The news of his coming presently filtered
through the forest aisles in advance of him. A merry,
white man, who spoke as if he was munch-
ing a mouthfiil of husked corn and made pleasant noises
on a sticL He paid fair prices for furs, but he knew a

A VENTURE IN FLUTES 33

mangy skin when he saw one. Grant him a seat by your
council fires, O, brothers of the Hodenosaunee.

Jacob was very happy over his trip. He returned to New
York with a pack half again as heavy as that with which
he had sailed up-river on a bluff-bowed Albany sloop.
And he was proud of his musical prowess, too. Surely, he
hadn’t made a mistake in venturing his first capital in
those seven flutes. They must be sold by now, he told
himself. Before leaving he had entrusted them to Samuel
Loudon, the printer, who published the New York Rackety
to sell on commission, and so soon as he had reported to
Quaker Browne — ^and paid a call at 81 Queen Street —
he hastened around to Loudon’s office. No luck! There
were his flutes, neatly rolled in the original bundle, and
until March of 1785 New Yorkers might read weekly in
the columns of the Racket an advertisement notifying
them that ^‘German Flutes of Superior Quality are to be
sold at this Printing Office.” Whether they were sold by
that date or not I cannot say. Probably they were, because
if they hadn’t been Jacob scarcely would have embarked
upon his next independent venture. He must still have
believed in flutes, you see.

Say what you please of our John Jacob, hate him as you
may before we are done with him — and if you hate him
or despise him you’ll share no opinion with me — ^his life
was as packed with the essence of romance as a nut is with
meat. The fellow couldn’t move in the ordinary byways
of commerce, without stirring the stardust that should be
reserved for the halos of great adventurers. And he as
prosaic, commonsensical, stolid an individual, when he
wasn’t tootling at a bit of Mozart, as you’d find perched
atop of a high stool in any counting-room!

Take the byordinary matter of matrimony. He man-
ages to impart a tinge of story-book magic even to that.
For here you have the poor emigrant boy, landing penni-

34 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

less in a strange city, going to work for a master on the
same block with the girl of his dreams, courting her most
deferentially, struggling upward at express speed the
while, faring forth into the wilderness to risk death from
the tomahawks of Indians or the claws of catamounts,
proving his mettle thereby — ^and, by George, sir, return-
ing to marry her! That is precisely what happened.

The only distressful aspect of the event is the damnable
lack of detail attending it. Not a soul among the 23,000
inhabitants of New York City, in 17^5) bad an idea that
there could be anything significant in the marriage of
young Jacob Ashdour, as he continued to pronounce his
name, and Widow Todd’s girl. The Brevoorts may have
sent some small gift to their poor kinswoman, and un-
doubtedly Heinrich and Dorothy were generous by their
lights} but the festivities were very plain, and there was
no honeymoon. The young couple blushed and tittered
in acceptance of the rough congratulations offered and
continued on at their several occupations; Sarah assisting
her mother, who had one more lodger in her son-in-law,
and Jacob sturdily endeavoring to merit the increased
salary he had wrung from Quaker Browne.

He had done well by Browne, and Browne was doing
well by him. The marriage was hardly more than con-
summated before the fur-merchant was commissioning his
clerk to journey north to Montreal. The Congress for-
bade the importation of furs from Canada, and Canada,
due to the retention of the frontier posts by the British,
was securing the pick of the Western furs. Browne’s cor-
respondents in London were clamoring for more pelts
than he could send, so the wily Quaker determined to
send his German assistant to Montreal to buy from the
Canadian trappers, and ship direct to London. Jacob
acquiesced with his usual cheeriness, and took passage by
river-sloop for Albany, whence he tramped overland,
pack on back, to the foot of Lake George. Here he hired
a canoe, and paddled the lake, portaged to Lake Cham-

A VENTURE IN FLUTES 35

plain and continued by water as swiftly as his lithe
muscles would propel him.

An arduous and perilsome trip, which, coming so soon
after the traversing of the Long House, made of him a
very capable forest runner. He knew the tricks of the
frontier, how to find his way by the stars and the sun, how
to tell which was north by the moss on tree-trunks, how
to throw up a lean-to and build a fire in the rain, how to
stalk deer or wild turkey, how to detect the crisp warning
of the rattlesnake, how to repair a slit in the birchen walls
of his frail craft with a slice of bark and a handful of
spruce-gum, how to judge the morrow’s weather. More
important than this, though, were the contacts with new
minds and intelligences and the perspective he was gain-
ing on a country which had been a mere blob on a map
to him two years since. He was, in a very real sense,
discovering America for himself, getting a clearer idea
of its resources than was possessed by most of the great
merchants in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, who
talked leisurely of what the Constitutional Convention
might accomplish — ^if it accomplished anything, which a
good many persons of consequence gravely doubted.

In one short year, you will note, Jacob had mastered
the complete process of the fur-trade. He had learned
to care for furs, to differentiate them and judge their
quality} he had learned the technic of trading with the
Indians, who must always be made to believe that they
had the best of a deal} he had learned how to bargain
with the farmers, who trapped and hunted to vary the
monotony of their work, and must be lured with odd-
ments whose cheapness was disguised by novelty} he had
learned the international aspects of the business, and made
himself known in Montreal to the factors and powerful
free-trappers, who were called — and not in modcery —
“Les Seigneurs des Lacs et des Forets*^-, he had learned
the geography of the fur business, where the best pelts
of different species of animals came from, where was the

36 JOHN JACOB AST OR

heaviest volume of trade and the trade-goods which ap-
pealed most successfully to this tribe or that.

Fast work for the emigrant lad. The four years in Lon-
don hadn’t been wasted, for it is obvious that he must
have acquired more there than a facility at English. He
had developed in his mind the power of analyzing and
comprehending the unfamiliar, and schooled himself to
meet and attract very different types of men. Already, at
twenty-two, he was a personality. He was lifting himself
out of the rut, which had clamped his family for three
generations to the earth. He was reaching upward, as
naturally as a tree reaches for the sunlight, for the power
which should be his — ^and for which, as yet, he had no
conscious use. That he was discontented, fiercely, blindly
discontented, was perhaps the healthiest sign of all. If he
could do so much for Quaker Browne, what couldn’t
he do for himself?

The venture in flutes? He refused to be discouraged by
the memory of this failure. There was a reason for that,
he was certain. You couldn’t sell goods successfully with-
out a shop to display them in and to attract customers.
And if he secured the agency for Astor & Broadwood in-
struments, Sarah could manage the sale of them over the
counter while he was out in the woods collecting furs for
a complementary business. People who bought musical
instruments likewise bought furs, and those furs he
couldn’t sell in New York he’d find a market for in Lon-
don. He returned from that trip to Montreal with a very
definite project in his head, and all the arguments of
Quaker Browne couldn’t deter him. He’d come to America
to be his own master, and his own master he proposed to
be, an ambition which Sarah frankly encouraged. She was
a perfect partner. Everything she possessed, mental,
physical, material, she plvunped in with his. And unlike
many women, who labor to advance a hard-driving hus-
band, she drew a fair reward of happiness.

BOOK TWO

THE FOREST RUNNER

Sarah had brought with her a dowry of $300, and Jacob
had managed to hoard a couple of hundred more, mostly
the result of occasional private ventures in the rarer furs.
This sum was their capital. For shop they were contented
with the front first-floor room in Mrs. Todd’s house;
the rear room on the same floor was their home, living
quarters, kitchen, sleeping chamber, and presently, nurs-
ery. Their stock in trade Jacob obtained from his unde
in London on long-term credits, and on May 22, 1786,
the couple’s venture was publicly launched with a card in
the Nevj York Packet'.

“Jacob Astor, No. 81 Queen Street, Two doors from
the Friends’ Meeting House, has just imported from
London an elegant assortment of musical instruments,
such as Piano Fortes, spinnets, guitars; the best of violins,
German Flutes, darinets, hautboys, fifes; the best Roman
violin strings and all other kinds of strings; music boxes
and paper, and every other article in the musical line,
which he will dispose of for very low terms for cash.”

Thus was the Astor fortune started. You will observe
that there is no word of furs in this advertisement — ^an
omission which is to be explained by the fact that time
was required to collect a stock of peltry. The very day
the advertisement appeared he was plimging through the
forests on the Niagara frontier, back bent beneath the
weight of his pack, rifle in hand, bullet-pouch, powder-
horn, hunting-knife, and haversack slapping his thighs.
Clouds of gnats settled on his sweat-daubed face; his torn
and dirty clothing stuck to his body; briars tripped him;
pains shot up his loins and racked his shoidders. At inter-
vals he leaned against a tree to rest, every couple of hours

40 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

slipped off the seventy-five pound pack, and straightened
his limbs and flexed his cramped muscles. Perhaps he
stuffed a palmful of tobacco into his pipe, and puffed lux-
uriously, stretched out on the carpet of the leaves. But
his self-indulgence was short-lived. In ten minutes he
would be on his feet again, slinging the heavy pack into
place, whistling gently as he set his moccasined feet to
the trail.

At night he was fortunate if he might share the hearth
of a settler^s cabin or scratch fleas with the inmates of an
Indian’s bark lodge. As often as not he slept beneath the
stars, fir-boughs for his couch, a hastily contrived lean-to
for roof. Wherever he went he was keen for a bargain.
No trade was too small for him. He’d dicker half an hour
for a muskrat skin, dole out the pile of beads or needles
and thread which were his price and be off once more,
whistling cheerily one of those tender, sentimental tunes
he had learned from Valentine Jeune and stray Heidel-
berg students. A cheerful, friendly, curious fellow, this
Jacob, as all who encountered him were willing to testify.

He liked people in a hearty German way, was inter-
ested in what they were doing and in their problems,
always willing to stop and discuss the chances for crops
with a farmer or swap experiences with some far-ranging
trapper. He had an eye, too, for geography and economic
factors. When Syracuse and Rochester, Utica and Buffalo,
were scanty clearings he was predicting the cities that
should crush the forest beneath a ponderous weight of
brick and stone, and a generation before the Erie Canal
was dug he held forth in the taprooms of wilderness
taverns concerning the results which should flow from a
line of transportation linking the Great Lakes with the
sea. In a couple of years he became a familiar figure in
the most remote corners of the State. Each Spring men
would cock their ears for the welcome tang of his gut-
tural, broken speech — ‘^Ach, mein friendt! vot vas it like,
der vinter for you, eh?” He covild be trusted to have all

THE FOREST RUNNER 41

the latest gossip of New York, a vast, sprawling town,
which, men said, in awe-struck tones, now boasted of
25,000 people. He would know what was doing in poli-
tics, whether it was true that there was to be a Republic,
and General Washington wasn’t to be made King, after
all. He even could tell you what the rich merchants had
heard from London by the last mail-packet, and predict
the trend of business in the coming months. And he
always carried honest goods, too. No man who traded
with him had cause for complaint. True, he drove a sharp
bargain, but that was to be expected, and he was always
alert to add to his stock odd things he found a demand
for.

Besides the annual journey North into the Iroquois
country, where the People of the Long House sat sul-
lenly by their dying counsel fires, dreaming of their
glorious past, nursing red-painted axes for the day of
vengeance that should never come, Jacob resumed on his
own account the trips to Montreal he had made formerly
for Quaker Browne. There was more profit for him in
this roundabout trade, however questionable — with its
evasion of the prohibition of intercourse betwixt Canada
and the free Colonies not yet cemented into the United
States — ^than in his precarious ventures on the Niagara
frontier. Where a Yankee would have been suspect, per-
haps laid by the heels, this German youth had free entry,
and was encouraged to make what he could out of the
baflling situation. So every dollar he could save or‘ bor-
row to augment his scanty original capital went in trade-
goods to purchase the furs that the Canadian “Lords of
the Lakes and Forests” fetched from Michilimackinac,
Grand Portage, and Sault Ste. Marie.

Yet it is an indication of the stufF of which he was
made that this relatively easy trade beyond the frontier
didn’t spoil him for the less profitable ventures. He con-
tinued, not only his visits to the Long House, but shorter
trips up Long Island, through New Jersey into Northern

42 JOHN JACOB AST OR

Pennsylvania, and along the line of the Hudson to taEe
Champlain. In the milder months of the year, sometimes
when the country was deep under snow, he was tireless
on the trail, plodding, plod^ng, plodding, never less than
sixty pounds weighing down his broad shoulders — ^and
never content unless his load grew heavier with the sub-
stitution of stifF pelts for the lighter bulk of the knick-
knacks that paid for them. Thousands of miles he walked
every year, and always burdened, remember. If he was
afloat, there was a paddle to wield. And he couldn’t pause
if the weather was inclement. Time was too precious,
money too scarce.

He was hard put to it for funds in those early years,
and at first, he tvirned to Heinrich. Brother Heinrich was
prospering. The richest butcher in the Fly Market, folks
whispered. He had adopted a policy of riding fifteen or
twenty miles into Westchester County to meet the drovers
bringing their herds in to sell to the city butchers at the
impromptu stockyards adjoining the Bull’s Head Tavern
on the Boston Pxist Road (Third Avenue). Meeting a herd
up near White Plains, say, Heinrich would cannily oflFer a
price considerably under what the beasts should be worth,
at the Bull’s Head, and the drovers glad to be saved an
extra day’s work, would accept. Whereupon Heinrich,
with a couple of lads to help him, would conduct the
herd to town, able to undersell the other stalls in the
Fly Market and possibly dispose of a few head to his
father-in-law and his friends — at a substantial profit, to
be sure.

Sometimes, then, Jacob borrowed from Heinrich,
which wasn’t a pleasant experience because Heinrich was
a person who cordially disapproved both of borrowing
and lending. Other times Jacob borrowed from Nathaniel
Prime, the outstanding banker and money-lender of Wall
Street, but this was an even more unpleasant experience
than going to Heinrich and being received with a bellow
of curses and admonitions. Prime was a hard man, who

THE FOREST RUNNER 43

operated at a time when usury was the rule 5 he demanded
a very high rate of interest and a large commission for
getting what was termed long paper discounted. And so,
after being pinched a few times, and compelled practically
to double his loan upon repayment, Jacob turned his back
upon Prime. He’d deal with brother Heinrich. Better be
abused than squeezed by a usurer.

The next time he had obligations to meet, and no
funds available, he called on Heinrich. Stumblingly,
shamefacedly — for he hated borrowing, himself, with the
instinctive hatred of the thrifty — ^he stated his need. He
must have two hundred dollars at once. And he couldn’t
aflFord to pay Prime’s interest charge.

“Two hundred dollars,” shrieked Heinrich. “Gott im
Himmel, boy, am I made of money? Must you forever be
picking at my pocket? Where will you carry yourself by
such practices?”

“But it is not that I have been extravagant,” pleaded
Jacob. “You know I have had to expand my business, and
with next to nothing to work with.”

“You are a fool to expand beyond your means. Go
slow, and be safe.”

will after this, Heinrich. But I have had to take
every opportunity, and if I do not find two hun-
dred

“No! No — a thousand times no,” growled Heinrich.
“Borrowing is becoming a habit with you. You need a
lesson.”

“It will be an expensive one,” Jacob answered bitterly.
“I will lose half a season’s income.”

“Economize, then,” snapped his brother. “Bah, I tell
you what I will do. I will not lend you two hundred
dollars, now or any timej but I will give you one hundred
dollars, on the understanding that you never seek to bor-
row from me again.”

Jacob really needed that two hundred dollars, and
it was entirely true that his lack of it was no fault of his

44 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

own. His Husiness, and with it his commitments, had
grown out of all proportion to his limited means. He
had been obliged to incur debts in order to seize profits.
But he couldn’t afford Prime’s charges, and he knew that
when Heinrich’s voice acquired a certain edge there was
no arguing with his usually good-natured, but always pug-
nacious and opinionated, brother. Heinrich’s trouble was
lack of imagination, of that quality of vision which leads
a conservative, sound-thinking man to take chances. And
that was why Heinrich died a successful butcher, worth

half a million dollars, and Jacob But we are going

too fast.

Having gulped down the unpleasantness of his situa-
tion, Jacob cogitated swiftly, and fell back upon his usual
final recourse.

“I’ll talk to Sarah,” he said. “Perhaps she can see a
way for us. But I really need that extra hxmdred, Hein-
rich. If you — ”

“A hundred I give you. That’s all. A man who goes
too fast ends in the Bridewell.”

The law of New York, like the law of all countries at
that time, provided for the imprisonment of debtors, and
Jacob shuddered at the mere suggestion.

“I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said, and hastened home
to Queen Street, where Sarah was nursing Magdalen,
their firstborn, and contriving to vary housekeeping with
tending the shop.

I can’t pretend to know what device she suggested, but
at all events, the two of them managed to conjure up the
odd hundred by the ensuing morning, and Jacob accepted
Heinrich’s gift on the terms stipulated. It had seemed an
unfair, a heartless, proposition, when he first heard it; but
after a talk with Sarah and a night’s sleep, he was dis-
posed to adopt his brother’s philosophy. A young man in
his position simply couldn’t afford to over-extend himself.
He must adjust his affairs so that he could meet his com-

THE FOREST. RUNNER 45

mitments by the use of customary credits. And so strongly
did he come to feel on this point that he never borrowed
money again — ^until the day arrived when his business
had swollen to such a size that loans were a safe and
economic factor in it.

It must appear from this incident that Sarah was more
than ever a partner with her husband. Shoulder to shoul-
der, they worked and struggled, scrimped and saved. But
you needn’t pity them. They found happiness in their
toil. They were as happy in their two rooms in the Widow
Todd’s house as they were ever to be — although they
were of the few couples, who climb from poverty to
riches, and who are able to retain touch with the realities
of life. It never bothered Sarah that she was without a
waking moment to herself. If there wasn’t housework
to be done or a baby to tend or a customer to serve, there
were packs of fur to sort and rearrange, pelts to be cured
or beaten. All the light work, if there is such a thing, she
did — and that meant all the work, when he was absent
on one of his trading trips, which consumed about half
the year.

She had an excellent eye for furs, a better one than he
had, he was used to sayingj and he was always willing
to accept her judgment of values, as he was, likewise,
amenable to her advice. She wasn’t at all a lovely woman,
and labor and constant child-bearing soon robbed her of
youth’s freshness j but she retained that bloom, the inex-
plicable aura, which is distinctive of the woman beloved.
I doubt if she would have exchanged her life, with its
privations and wrenching toil, for any other existence.
For she possessed the satisfaction of accomplishment.
Whatever she attempted wasn’t done in vain. She had
set out to help her husband — and she did. She strove for
their children — and she raised the five who survived of
the seven she bore to heights she could never have
imagined in this stark period of unyielding effort.

46 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

A truly great figure, who had as much to do as Jacob
with the foundation of the Astor power. Like her mother,
in that she wasn’t disposed to exaggerate the advantage of
possessing good blood. Hard-headed, practical, she took
for granted that a cousin of the Brevoorts, who happened
to be poor, was as obligated to work as pretty Dorothy
Pessenger, Heinrich’s “pink of der Powery” — and per-
haps because of her blood, perhaps because of her practi-
cality, she made very much more of herself than did
pretty Dorothy. I like to think of her, trotting from front
room to back in the Queen Street house, comforting a
baby with colic, waiting on a petulant customer, answering
a merchant’s inquiry — “I’m sorry, sir. Mr. Astor won’t
be home from Canada before the month’s out. But if ’tis
that package of otter skins — Yes, sir, I have them ready
for you. The price will be ”

The earlier years of the Astors’ venture were starred with
failures and disappointments, but in speaking of these
afterward they were accustomed to remark that they
never had been discouraged. I see no reason why they
should have been. Possibly the progress they were making
seemed slow at the time, but expressed in cold figures,
either of time or of dollars and cents, it was as inevitable
as taxes. Their set-backs were transitory} their achieve-
ments were real and continuous. Within two years and a
half of the first card in the New York Rackety Jacob vras
able to advertise in the same medium, January lO, 1789:

John Jacob Astor
At No. 8 1 Queen Street,

Next door but one to the Friends^ Meeting House,
Has for sale an assortment of
Piano Fortes of the Newest Construction,
made by the best makers in London, which
he will sell at reasonable terms.

THE FOREST RUNNER

He gives cash for all kinds of Furs
And has for sale a quantity of Canada '
Beavers and Beavering Coating, Raccoon Skins,
and Raccoon Blankets, Muskrat Skins, etc., etc.

The musical instrument trade is still emphasized, but
the fxor trade evidently is coming to the front — a fore-
shadowing of Jacob’s decision several years hence to retire
from the instrument business, and make over his connec-
tions with Astor & Broadwood and other manufacturers
to Michael Raff, who entered business as his successor,
and was a famous gossip and man-about-town for a gen-
eration or so.

In 1789 Jacob was also able to make his first real
estate investment; two lots on the Bowery Lane, which
he purchased for £250 (equivalent to $625) “current
money of the State of New York.” He paid cash, and
Heinrich was witness to the deed. It is not without sig-
nificance that this inauguration of the Astor holdings oc-
curred in the year in which George Washington entered
upon his duties as first President of the United States.
Jacob, as I shall show presently, while, in the ordinary
sense of the term, a good citizen — ^he became one as soon
as he could — ^was never a good American; but his pros-
perity was bound up with the national fortunes. The Ger-
man peasant boy, who had landed at Baltimore with
twenty-five dollars, when the federated Colonies were
just beginning to bicker over what form of Government
should replace that which they had cast ofiF, mounted step
by step the ladder of wealth and fame, precisely as the
thirteen constituent units of the Republic drew closer to-
gether, and expanded under the relentless urge of circum-
stance. If he had realized this more clearly, if there had
burned in his soul a hot flame of patriotism, his wealth,
vast as it should become, must have been infinitely greater.
But probably this is asHng too much. Your trafficker in
commerce seldom, if ever, is granted the statesman’s mind.

48 JOHN JACOB AST OR

In less than a year after his investment in the Bowery,
Jacob had money to spare to purchase a house and lot
at No. 40 Little Dock (now part of Water) Street, and
at this address makes his first appearance in the City
Directory: “Astor, J. J., Fur Trader.” The music busi-
ness, although not yet discarded, had become entirely
secondary by this date. Indeed, he had purchased the
house in Little Dock Street to provide room for his ex-
panding fur business — and in part, at least, for his grow-
ing family} two children, apparently, had been born in
the pair of r.oms in Queen Street, and there was prospect
of another. Very likely he heard of the house in Litde
Dock Street through a hatter named Cooper, who dwelt
not far from No. 40, and was a good customer of his.
Cooper had a small son named Peter, who afterward had
some business relations with Astor, but at this date was
occupied in pulling the long hairs out of the rabbitskins,
which his father employed in making the cheaper grades
of hats.

Obviously, the pressure on Jacob and Sarah was easing
somewhat. But they were as stinting of themselves as
ever. They took no heed to luxuries or indulgences. They
had no social life. Most of the rooms in their new house
were used for the storage of the cumbersome packs of
fur, which were sent to Jacob, now, by hunters and store-
keepers acting as his agents in the less settled districts.
Already, he was building in embryo the organization,
which, a few years hence, should carry his name across
the continent and make him the most famous merchant
of the period. And building such an organization, laying
the foundations for a great business, was expensive. All
the money that came in, and that wasn’t necessary to keep
body and soul together and care for the children, was
diverted to the nourishment of the machine which had
produced it. Jacob no longer tramped the forest trails,
pack on back. That would be a waste of time. He trav-
eled by wagon, picking up peltry at convenient points

THE FOREST RUNNER 49

where the trappers who dealt with him either left their
catches or met him. But this didn’t necessarily mean that
his journeys were free from danger. The Wadsworth
who was Squire of Geneseo in the last decade of the
eighteenth century liked to recount how he met Trader
Astor in difficulties on the bounds of his domain. Jacob’s
wagon had bogged down in a swampy bit of road, a small
keg of gold, representing his capital of the moment, had
rolled over the tailpiece and disappeared in a patch of
quicksand, which had likewise devoured the frantic horses,
and Jacob himself had struggled clear with no more than
his axe. What most impressed the worthy Squire, how-
ever, was the fur-trader’s imperturbability in face of such
a disaster. Jacob’s attitude was that the worst had hap-
pened. Very well, forget it and start afresh. After all,
it was better to lose a keg of gold in a quicksand, and
wipe the slate clean, than to commit yourself to Nathaniel
Prime for interminable years at a mounting rate of in-
terest and commissions, bonuses, and penalties.

He continued to visit Montreal every year. His trade
from Canada direct to London was at least as important
as the trade he conducted through New York. A friendly
soul, he had been fortunate enough — or sufficiently far-
seeing — ^to strike up an acquaintance in Montreal with a
fur-trader named Alexander Henry, a man of some edu-
cation, endowed with considerable powers of observation,
who left a record of his experiences, “Travels & Adven-
tures in Canada & the Indian Territories,” which is an
accurate source of information on the trade. Through
Henry he met other prominent traders, and was enabled
to fortify himself in a position which I have already
described as questionable, but which became more assured
from year to year.

The demand for fims was undiminished, and now that
there was peace, and that the nearer Indian tribes were
fairly friendly, so far as the Canadians were concerned,
furs poured into Montreal.

50 JOHN JACOB ASfOR

For instance, in I793> the Northwest Company of
Canada shipped 106,000 beaver, 2,100 bear, 1,500 fox,
400 kit fox, 16,000 muskrat, 32,000 marten, 1,800 mink,
6,000 lynx, 6,000 wolverine, i,6oo fisher, lOO raccoon,
1,200 dressed deer, 700 elk, and 550 buffalo skins. This
company operated almost entirely in the country border-
ing the Great Lakes; it was a determined opponent to
American attempts to invade its territories, now and in
the future. But its managers seem never to have realized
that in allowing Astor, first, to embark upon the trade
in Montreal, and second, actually to push west with its
brigades into the forbidden lands, it was preparing the
way for an onslaught which must drive it to the wall.

Why he was ever permitted to go is difficult to deter-
mine. Possibly, it was his continental personality, his
foreign manner and broken speech, which differentiated
him from the hated Yankees. Possibly, Henry and other
Canadian friends contributed to the result. Certainly, he
was a winning fellow when he wished to be, of a pleas-
antly virile personality, rugged in physique, hardy, a good
talker, and popular for his gift of music, always welcome
at any campfire. His features had begun to settle into the
cast which was to become familiar to New Yorkers of the
next half-century. It was a strong face, as his contem-
poraries testified, clean-shaven, the hair straight and long
and fair, the eyes “deeper set than Webster’s,” the nose
large and high-arched, the jaw square and heavy, the
mouth firm. The head, a conqueror’s head, firmly set on a
thick neck.

Whatever the reason for the favor shown him, he was
no longer content to visit Montreal, and purchase his furs
at second hand. He started North earlier, in time to con-
nect with the jovial brigades that left for Grand Portage
as soon as the ice was out, and took his place in one of
the immense' canoes of four tons burthen, which com-
posed the Spring fleet, each carrying, besides its crew of
eight or ten men — ^“Pork-eaters” in the parlance of the

THE FOREST RUNNER 51

frontier — sixty-five ninety-pound packs of trade goods,
six hundred pounds of biscuit, two hundred pounds of
pork, three bushels of peas, two oilcloths to cover the
cargo, a sail, an axe, a towing-line, a kettle and a sponge
to bail with, since the bark hull of the monstrous craft
was too delicate to permit the use of any more substantial
utensil.

One of these canoes, or a part of its cargo-space, would
be hired by Jacob, who already had arranged to import
direct from London whatever trade-goods he required —
coarse cloth, milled blankets, linen and coarse sheeting,
threads and twine, hardware, arms, ammunition, cutlery,
ironmongery, brass and copper kettles, silk and cotton
handkerchiefs, hats, shoes, stockings, blue beads, calicoes,
cottons, and strangest of all, penny prints made in
England for the amusement of children, which were in
demand amongst the savages as talismans against evil.
He also fetched with him from New York a quantity of
wampum, which he bought by the bushel from the Dutch
of Communipaw, in New Jersey, as well as from the
Long Island Indians, who dwelt along the Great South
Bay and were experts at cutting, polishing and boring the
periwinkle, clam and oyster shells of which it was made.
Wampum had an established value, and was used as cur-
rency by the rural Dutch, no less than by the Indians.
Six beads of white or three beads of black were equal to
one English penny j a string six feet long was worth four
guilders, or $1.50 — and the six feet were measured by
the distance between a man’s arms outstretched, always
the tallest, longest-limbed man procurable. The inland
tribes especially prized wampum because of its rareness
with them. Jacob found it one of the best, and cheapest,
means of barter available.

From Montreal to Grand Portage was eighteen hun-
dred miles, and the canoes of the fur fleet might make
as much as six miles an hour in good weather; but they
had only six inches clearance when loaded, and the least

52 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

storm on the open lakes drove them to the beach. The
men who composed the crews, white men and half-breeds,
were mostly French Canadians, dark, swaggering, hard-
living wastrels, almost as difficult to manage as the proud
savages of the tribes below the Lakes, who were still
jealous of the white man’s intrusion, and should not cease
to be a menace to the setders seeping down the Ohio until
after Tecumseh’s confederacy was crushed by William
Henry Harrison at Tippecanoe in i8ii — or, as a matter
of fact, until after the conclusion of the War of 1812
convinced the Western tribes that the British could not
help them regain their lost lands between the Lakes
and the Ohio.

The trader who dealt with the voyageurs and their
wilder brethren, the couriers des bois, or trappers, who
dwelt with the outlying savages, sometimes beyond the
Mississippi, must possess tact and firmness. There was a
constant need of rough diplomacy, the knowledge when
to say no, with a curse to emphasize it, and when to inter-
pose a jest or turn an ugly threat with a reasonable coun-
ter-o£Fer. The Indians, too, required deft handling. They
must not be hurried in driving a bargain, and as I have
said before, they must always be sent away with the
impression that they had bested the white man. Brawls
were frequent, and a brawl meant bared knives or toma-
hawks, victims screaming on the ground under the pres-
sure of gouging thumbs.

Death was an incident to such men, and their manners
were colored by a lifetime of association with Sacs and
Foxes, Winnebagoes and Pottawotomies, Shawnees and
Hurons. They labored only when they must, like the
Indians j they took no thought to what lay ahead} they
drank themselves into a stupor whenever the opportunity
ofFeredj they were as touchy as children, and as thought-
less, hated whoever chanced to incommode them, took
scalps with a blithe zest and were as superstitious and as
ignorant as their red neighbors, their religion a quaint

THE FOREST RUNNER 53

jumble of depraved Christianity and Indian folklore.
But with all their vices and shortcomings they were the
advance-guard of the white race in the penetration of the
continent. They, and men like them, were the precursors
of Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and all the
glorious company of trapper-adventurers, who made
known the wonders of the West and established a definite
grip upon a domain which had been only legendary until
they explored it.

From these wide-wandering forest runners Jacob heard
stories of rivers and teeming prairies and mountain-
ranges which could be found on no map of that dayj
and when, after days of paddling, the fur fleet reached
Sault Ste. Marie, and came to rest for a week, he had
confirmation of these stories from the rich free-traders,
who dwelt by the Straits — ^John Johnson, the Irish hus-
band of White Fisher, daughter of a chief; and George
and Charles Ermatinger, sons of a Swiss merchant, who
were delighted to hear their German speech, and pressed
Jacob to stay with them a while. Why not? They had
ample stores of peltry for trade, and would secure him
anything he desired. He might, if he chose, fare afield
with some of their Indians, trade for himself with the
near-by tribes.

He was tempted, for the journey had been a weary
one, and the stage ahead was more dangerous. Also, the
Ermatingers and Johnson lived in luxury, considering
the leagues of wilderness which separated them from the
more primitive civilization of the frontier. But when
his new friends supported the tales of the forest runners
he would not relinquish his intention to continue with the
fleet. He felt already the itch for opening up this un-
known country, which should dominate him all his life
and compel him, in spite of certain blindnesses of concep-
tion, to be perhaps the most potent individual factor in
the acquisition and setdement of the trans-Mississippi
West. And he wanted, as a business man, to learn this

54 JOHN JACOB AST OR

country, to be in a position to estimate its resources. So
he shoved off with the diminished fleet — for some of the
canoes tarried to ferry back to Montreal the fur-take of
the Straits — ^and waved a dripping paddle in farewell to
the kindly Swiss.

On, then, day after day, around the shores of Lake
Superior to Grand Portage, with its imposing fort,
wharves, and several trading-posts, at the terminus of a
road, which led ten miles across country to Pigeon River,
down which came the canoes of questing savages or cour-
iers des boisy eager for the delights of this outermost out-
post of civilization after the hardships of the winter. Here
there was a rude, but bounteous, hospitality. Here, those
hearty, loud-mouthed, feudal-minded gentry, the “Lords
of the Lakes and Forests,” dwelt in semi-royal pomp,
supplied with choice wines and liquors, cherished by
harems of Indian wives, lording it more or less success-
fully over the red minions, who hated them, but must
trade for the precious rifles and ammunition, which were
becoming as necessary to the Indian as the white man.

The Seigneurs of the Kingdom of Fur seem to have
taken a fancy to the young German trader. Was it his
gift at tooding sentimental tunes? Or the intangible
quality of worth, which was making friends for him so
rapidly amongst the merchants of New York? Whatever
the reason, he was bidden to the festal boards, talked to
openly and frankly, suffered to meet and interrogate the
shambling, lank-haired forest runners, whose restless eyes
flickered continually this way and that in their copper-
brown faces, who jumped lithely at a furtive step behind
them. Here were men to satisfy Jacob’s curiosity! Men
who told him of the wealth of beaver and otter on the
Red River of the North, who had seen the yellow Mis-
souri in spate, who spoke haltingly of what they called
the Shining Mountains, hulking across the Western sky,
propping the clouds upon their dazzling peaks. How far?
A shrug. It might be so many pipes — ^vague reckoning.

THE FOREST RUNNER 55

at best. In your forest runner’s lingo, a pipe was a league,
three miles j but very few men, Jacob knew from experi-
ence, nursed a load of tobacco longer than two miles,
some not so far.

However, he was fascinated by the slow-drawled
stories of these men, who were separated so often from
their own kind that they had lost the faculty of ready
speech. They confirmed him in the opinion that the known
fur-countries were backed by others infinitely richer. The
problem of the future, as he saw it, was to establish the
means of reaching out, farther and farther, into the dim
regions of the West. The man who pushed farthest and
fastest would be the man to control the trade, and al-
though he never voiced the thought to his hosts, he sus-
pected that in the course of years the Canadians’ initial
advantage would be neutralized by the more direct routes
open to the Americans and the richer markets which could
be developed in the cities of the Atlantic coast.

So, all summer, at the crude banquets in the trading-
posts, the carousels on the open prairie, where white man,
red man, and half-breed drank and boasted and quarreled
together in a mental atmosphere like nothing so much as
the ale-bouts of a group of Viking chiefs, all summer,
then, Jacob gathered information with his furs. Both
came cheap. He paid much less for the peltry here at
Grand Portage than he had in Montreal, and he was able
to select a better quality. It was a trip worthwhile. When
he was homesick, when he thought of Sarah plodding up
and downstairs in Little Dock Street, probably one of
the babies whining with “summer complaint,” he found
comfort in the reflection that there’d be more money to
spend next year. He missed Sarah a great deal. He was,
all his life, a man whose chief recreation was his family,
who loved children very genuinely and appreciated with
a certain taut sincerity the true measure of the debt of
gratitude he owed his wife. But fortunately for him the
phlegmatic temperament inherent in his racial strain

56 JOHN JACOB AST OR

helped him to curb depression, so that no matter how his
heart ached, he could manage to sing a Volkslieder or
tootle ^‘Ein Feste Bur^* for some ochre-streaked Dakotah
chief, who must be impressed with the white man’s omnis-
cience.

Well, it was worth it all. He began to feel that he was
gaining a true perception of this vast, inchoate America,
and sometimes, sitting at table with the Seigneurs and
their red guests, or listening to the naive boasts of an
Ojibway half-breed, who shared red world and white and
belonged to neither, he would chuckle absentmindedly as
he recalled the boyish dreams that Heinrich’s brash let-
ters had evoked in Waldorf. Waldorf! Incredibly remote,
now — ^more remote than those half-mythical Shining
Mountains of which the forest runners spoke. And that
Heinrich — ^Ach, he knew nothing of the real America,
this interminable land of forest and plain, lake and moun-
tain. All Heinrich knew was New York, as far as White
Plains. Nothing! This America he knew might contain all
of Europe. Here, in this very wilderness someday, should
rise cities, the smoke of farm-chimneys threading them
together. But in the meantime there was fur. And such
fur! The harsher winters of the Northwest insured richer
pelts, yet they cost even less than the scrawny hides the
Iroquois hunters haggled over.

For a common musket he could get ten prime beaver
pelts. For a pound of gunpowder, two pelts; for four
pounds of shot, one pelt; for a hatchet, one pelt; for
six small knives, one pelt; for a pound of glass beads,
two pelts; for a cloth coat, six pelts; for a petticoat, five
pelts; for a pound of cheap snufF, one pelt; for a stroud
blanket, ten pelts; for a white blanket, eight pelts; for a
foot length of Spencer’s black, twist tobacco, especially
craved by the savages, one pelt; for a bottle of rum, two
pelts. And so on. The cheapest commodities, awls, flints,
steels, toys, knickknacks the New York shops couldn’t sell,
would turn out to be worth more than their weight in

THE FOREST RUNNER si

gold. He must break into this field, he decided. Enough,
for the present, to have the privilege of participating in
the trade through Montreal, but the time must come when
his own brigades, based from New York, should drive
along the southern shores of the Lakes, and reap an
independent harvest.

At the conclusion of the summer rendezvous Jacob fared
eastward with the returning Northwestern brigades. In
Montreal he arranged to ship his purchases to London,
wrote his agents there ordering additional trade-goods for
the coming season, and bidding good-by to Henry and
the rest of his boisterous friends, embarked alone for his
overland journey to New York. First and last, I suppose
he’d travel more than 53OOO miles in the course of these
summers, and even his iron muscles must have been weary
as he plied his paddle in warm weather and wet or labored
under canoe and pack across the portages. He wasn’t fin-
ished with his task by any means, for he must stop off at
intervals along the way to pick up packs of furs collected
by his agents or ascertain what they had forwarded to
New York for him in past months. For example, there
woidd be Peter Smith at Utica. Peter had a son who
should be famous, Gerrit. He was an occasional partner
of Astor, the trading-store he ran, in a corner of his house
at the forest crossroads where a city was to spawn, serving
as a convenient assembly point for the furs collected by
the Indians of the Mohawk Valley.

But at long last the Dutch-gabled houseroofs of Albany
would rear above the tree-tops, and Jacob might sigh con-
tentedly and consign himself and such spoil as he had
acquired to a river-sloop for the voyage down the Hud-
son. He could never tell how long this voyage would
take, five days probably, at the least, and the interest the
other passengers showed in the adventures of one so far-
traveled couldn’t stifle the growing impatience for a sight

58 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

of Sarah and the children. All these months he had never
heard from them — so far as he knew, they might be dead.
New York was ravaged every summer by epidemics which
filled the cemeteries with victims of wrong dieting and
limited medical skill. And more than once ill tidings met
him at the door.

I wonder whether the saddest tragedy of his life — and
Sarah’s — happened during one of these unavoidable ab-
sences; the accident which made his oldest son, John
Jacob, 3rd, an idiot. Whenever he came home his first
question would be: “How is der poy?” And Sarah knew
whom he meant — ^not William Backhouse, the grubby
urchin crawling on the floor, but the vacant-eyed creature
kept in a room upstairs. And the tears would dew her
cheeks as she answered invariably; “Just the same, Jacob.”
Neither of them ever quite relinquished hope that some
miracle of science or nature would retrieve the unfor-
tunate’s normality, and in the most touching clause of
his will Jacob stipulated that the income of $10,000 pro-
vided for the maintenance of his namesake should be
increased to $100,000 in the event of a restoration of
sanity — this after a lapse of fifty years.

But they were a sensible couple, who realized they had
much to be thankful for in the rest of their offspring,
a sturdy, upstanding brood. Besides William, named for
a merchant who had befriended them in this striving time,
Dorothea was born in Little Dock Street, and a fifth,
Eliza, was to come after they had removed to a more
fashionable neighborhood. Two others, as I have said,
died in infancy, victims of those devastating fevers which
swept the insanitary city in the hot months. Seldom a
year passed that Sarah wasn’t either bearing or nursing
a child in the midst of her innumerable tasks, but it would
never have occurred to her to protest what she regarded
as an inevitable — and on the whole, welcome — conse-
quence of matrimony.

Proud Sarah! All the toil and heartache, all the waiting.

THE FOREST RUNNER 59

and longing, seemed worthwhile when her Jacob stumped
up the street, pushing a handcart laden with the cargo he
had brought down-river from Albany. They’d sit atop
of the hair-speckled table on which the furs were beaten
to dislodge the moths, their arms around each other —
and first Jacob would tell of the immensity of the inland
seas he’d traversed and the richness of the West and the
splendid furs he’d shipped to London — and then she’d
tell how Captain Cooper’s hat business was growing, and
he must have two hundred more prime beaver skins —
and break off to recite an anecdote of Magdalen’s helpful-
ness— and be reminded that Mr. Backhouse and Mr.
Browne had asked for him, and that horrid Mr. Prime
— and Heinrich had another assistant in the stall in the
Fly Market, but no, Dorothy hadn’t a baby yet, probably
never would have one, now — ^and he’d whisper in her ear,
and she’d giggle, and hug him closer. They couldn’t work
hard all the time or be forever serious, could they?

Well, the hardest years were practically over for them.
In 1794, Jay’s Treaty with England was signed, and
although the illustrious Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court had never heard of so humble a person as a Ger-
man-American fur-trader named Astor, the effects of the
Treaty were more important for him, perhaps, than for
any other individual. Under its terms, the British reluc-
tantly evacuated the line of military posts, by means of
which they had successfully barred the Americans from
the Great Lakes and the territory immediately south
of them, and the fur countries of the West were laid
open for his exploitation, either through Montreal or
New York.

The Treaty couldn’t have come at a better time for
Astor’s interests. He had built up his business to a point
where he was justified in devoting more of his time to
his managerial responsibilities j he had established a chain
of agents, which he was able, by reason of his many con-
tacts with frontiersmen, to expand immediately} and his

6o JOHN JACOB AST OR

connections at Montreal, Sault Ste. Marie, and Grand
Portage permitted him to obtain all the furs he could
handle at the moment from the Canadian field. He
didn’t, of course, abandon altogether his direct trade from
Montreal to London. There were certain obvious advan-
tages in it, the saving in transportation costs, the broad-
ening of his purchasing field and the conciliation of those
arrant Britishers, who disliked to deal with the United
States} but he pegged away at the development of a
system of posts, agents, and transportation brigades be-
tween New York and the far West, so that in the long
run he could dispense with Montreal as a shipping point.

His purpose in this was economic rather than patriotic,
I gather. The outstanding defect in his character was the
element of impersonality which entered into all his
business enterprises. Cautious, cold-blooded, essentially
phlegmatic, he meastxred any deal by the safe profits he
could foresee. If he couldn’t foresee safe profits, he wasn’t
interested. And it didn’t seem good business to him to
adopt a policy for national or patriotic reasons, regardless
of the stake in view. A strange blind spot. Except for it,
he had in him the true instincts of the Empire-builder.
Indeed, and almost in spite of himself, he was an Empire-
builder — ^in a sense, the greatest Empire-builder the coun-
try ever knew. But he muffed his full opportunity because
he measured it in strict terms of dollars and cents, electing
to sink his investments in the narrow compass of Man-
hattan instead of the untamed lands his trappers won for
the Republic. Had he done otherwise, his descendants
might not have inherited so many millions, although even
that is questionable} but surely, his statue would have
been the favorite monument of the West, and probably,
the Pacific would have laved the shores of a State named
Astoria.

None of which debatable eventualities could have been
apparent to him in 1794. What was apparent was that
the country was fairly launched as a sovereign entirety.

THE FOREST RUNNER 6i

and that, after the years of uncertainty and fumbling en-
deavor succeeding the Revolution, a period of prosperity
was at hand. Two separate causes made for this: the
natural growth and evolution of the country, itself, en-
couraged by the realization of a permanent government,
and the series of wars, consequent upon the French Revo-
lution, which should rack Europe for the ensuing twenty
years and divert to American hands an abnormal share
of world commerce.

New York, itself, mirrored the nation’s situation. By
the middle ’90’s, while still tagging Philadelphia, the
national capital, its population had swollen to 40,000, and
it was commencing to dribble across Warren Street into
the Lispenard Meadows. People complained of the over-
crowding, which was really unhealthy, and the influx of
immigrants, mainly refugees from Haiti, French folk
and people of color, driven out by the negro insurrection
— ^but one result of this latter phenomenon was a supply
of excellent servants to augment the slaves, who consti-
tuted a recognizable strata of the city’s life for a genera-
tion to come. Business was booming. The overseas trade
was on the verge of the tremendous leap forward, which
should frighten Britain into promulgating the series of
Orders in Council and similar obnoxious measures, de-
signed to restrict American commerce, which, in turn,
should help to drive the two nations into a second war,
advantageous to neither. But as yet American shipping
hadn’t attained the proportions it was to reach within a
very few years, when the sails of our merchant fleet
whitened every sea, and the Starry Banner was familiar
from St. Petersburg to Canton. At this time only some
hundred vessels plied from the city, of which number
forty were square-riggers, averaging not over iio tons,
the largest of 250 tons, while the remainder were schoon-
ers and sloops in the coasting or West India trade.

Keeping step with the trend of affairs, Jacob moved his
residence and shop from Little Dock Street to more pre-

62 JOHN JACOB AS'TOR

tentious quarters at 149 Broadway thus ranging himself
with the vandals who were enraging Philip Hone and
other merchants of birth and property by their profana-
tion of what had been the city’s most fashionable thor-
oughfare. Broadway was doomed. Its stately tulips and
maples, which had seemed so gracious to the emigrant-
boy, would outlast his era, casting their shadows across
cobbles jarred by an endless procession of omnibuses;
many distinguished citizens, himself not the least amongst
them, would persist in clinging to its dusty curb. But
genuinely smart people moved over to upper Pearl Street
or Greenwich Street or into the newer streets cut through
the meadows and fields beyond Warren Street. Wall
Street, alas, wasn’t what it had been either, with bankers
and shippers buying up every house or lot offered for sale.
Well might the elder generation wag their heads, and
grumble that the city was ruined. An opinion Jacob
rejected with guttural contempt — Dwnkoff! he grunted
of such.

And a “DumkoffR* from him meant something nowa-
days. He was highly respected by the leading merchants,
known as a young man who did not need to seek credit
to meet his obligations. Even Heinrich had stopped
patronizing him, and instead, bragged to customers across
the coxinter of the stall in the Fly Market of “mein
leeddle brudder, Yakob,” and the part he, Heinrich, had
played in persuading him to come to America. Well-off as
Heinrich was, Jacob was wealthier, his wealth increas-
ing at a rate only he and Sarah knew. The string of trad-
ing-posts and agencies in the West lengthened from year
to year, and the fur-packs thudded in from the Albany
sloops at a rate, which presently required Jacob to charter
all the cargo-room of a ship for his London consignment.

It was no accident that the master of this ship was the
same John Whetten, who, as a mate, had advised Jacob
which was the most comfortable craft to book passage in
from London in November, ’84. Jacob never forgot this

THE FOREST RUNNER 63

favor, and the friendship which sprang from it persisted
as long as the two men lived.

The emigrant-boy was thriving. People pointed to him
in the street — “That’s Astor, the fur-trader. ’Ships more
than all the rest put together.” He was a Master Mason
in Holland Lodge, No. 8, and a trustee of the German
Reformed Church, the Consistory of which often met
at his home. He and Sarah had servants to wait upon
them, and while they lived very simply, they were able
to enjoy occasional diversions — ^the theater, of which
Jacob, especially, was very fond, and music, which he
liked still more. But it was the exception for them to
go out in the evening. He preferred to sit home, with
a pipe and a mug of beer and a friend over a game of
checkers, or perhaps, read in his Bible or Doddridge’s
“Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul,” or, if it
wasn’t Simday, SilUman's Journal, the organ of the fur-
trade. Speaking generally, he was as yet no reader, al-
though he had the traditional German respect for
knowledge and for men who possessed it.

He was frugal in his habits, too. By the end of the cen-
tury he was reputed to be worth two hundred and fifty
thousand dollars, which was a large fortune for those
daysj but the only changes in his method of living were
brought about by consideration of his family’s comfort and
his own health. He gave up the house at 149 Broadway,
moved his business to 71 Liberty Street, and established
Sarah and the children in a very handsome, commodious
readence at 223 Broadway, above Vesey Street.

It was one of a row of half a dozen, all with open
porches, fronted by massive pillars. “The best people”
still dwelt in this row, but what pleased the Astor tribe
was the plain satisfaction of possessing a home. No longer
must they smell the animal odor of raw fur whenever
they were indoors, and mingle with customers, draymen,
and business callers in the hall. There was ample room

64 JOHN JACOB AST OR

for all the five children, and the vinfortunate son had
the privacy his condition demanded.

Jacob, himself, indulged in the luxury of a saddle-
horse. Accustomed as he had been to the vigorous routine
of the forest runner, he felt the need of outdoor exer-
cise, and very sensibly decided to leave business in the
middle of the afternoon — he was in his office every morn-
ing at dawn — and after an early dinner, ride out the Bow-
ery, lined by rows of quaint, low-roofed, old Dutch
houses, covered with flowers in summer, or it might be,
through the lane that was to be Bleecker Street, where
wild roses and blackberries stirred in the soft wind. Then,
ahead of him, he had the choice of various b3q5aths across
the Stu3rvesant meadows and the thickets, swamps, and
farms stretching northwards beyond Greenwich Village
to the Harlem hills. Not time wasted, these rides. He
cherished an inflexible aversion to what he termed stock-
gambling— or any form of speculation, for that matter —
so most of his spare capital went into real estate, and his
conception of the New York of the future was acquired in
cantering the rough tracks which penetrated the little city’s
belt of wastelands.

The forest runner had become a man of affairs, laying
away bramble-choked blocks of acres to mature into build-
ing-sites as less visionary citizens laid away pipes of port
or madeira. A far cry from the emigrant-boy, trudging
up Broadway, with his seven flutes under his arm.

BOOK THREE
FUR AND TEA

FUR AND TEA

The final decade of the eighteenth century bustled into
the past with a resounding crash of values and scrapping
of outworn ideas. This preposterous thing called Liberty,
which Pastor Steiner had doubted, was gnawing like a
maggot at the underpinnings of autocracy and hereditary
privilege. If it was not precisely true that “all men are
created equal,” none the less advanced thinkers persisted
in asserting the right of all men to an equal opportunity.
That is, no man should be restrained from attempting to
advance himself through any accident of birth or economic
limitation j but not even the wildly radical United States
conceded political rights to the mob. Manhood suffrage
was unthought of. Property qualifications hedged the vote
with jealous safe-guards, and in New York would be
maintained until 1822. There was, too, in America, a
recognized upper class, an aristocratical tradition, which
was the backbone of the Federalist Party and should con-
trive to resist the assaults of the frontier Democracy for
another generation.

Much could be said for this aristocratical tradition. It
leant a mellowness to contemporary life, an easy dignity,
a fine savor of manners, which temporarily curbed and
softened the uncouth tendencies of the restless common-
alty, whose idol was Jefferson — ^himself an aristocrat of
aristocrats — and who were grasping, quite naturally, for a
share in a government, which, in spite of all the fine
phraseology of the Declaration of Independence, was
as much oligarchic as democratic. The aristocrats, mercan-
tile as a class in the North, provided the support, which
enabled the coxmtry to withstand the storms and crises
of the years succeeding the Revolution: the bickers which

68 JOHN JACOB AST OR

rent the Provisional Government, the issue o£ confedera-
tion or nonconfederation, the struggles in the Constitu-
tional Convention, the fight to secure the necessary
ratifications of the Constitution after it was adopted, the
troubles of Washington’s two Administrations — Shay’s
Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, the violent controversy
over the question of backing revolutionary France against
Britain.

But say what you may for the aristocratical tradition, it
had had its day. It stood for the old order, and manifestly,
any order called the old order is doomed, for that is a
confession that new ideas are abroad — and when did new
ideas eyer fail to supplant the old? Allowing, to be siare,
for the fact that what are called new ideas frequently are
old ideas redressed in a new verbiage, perhaps even a
shoddy verbiage — ^which, again, has nothing to do with
the major argument. No, the aristocratical tradition in
America was reaching the end of its tether, although it
had a deal of sterling service yet to give, should, for one
thing, operate to check the over-enthusiasm of the Demo-
crats, who were all for an alliance with the French against
the whole of Europe. An instance of the danger of logical
reasoning.

Hadn’t our own Revolution inculcated the French with
the spirit to cast off the shackles of the Bourbons? Any
American of the 1790s would have answered: yes. Very
well, then. Weren’t we responsible for this striking
tribute to our own political sagacity and independence?
We-ee-ell, perhaps — ^not so unanimous on this point. And
if we were responsible, didn’t it stand to reason that we,
as an honorable nation, should lend our strength to the
encouragement of doctrines we had fathered? More es-
pecially, when the chief enemy of this offspring of the
yeasty visions given shape in Independence Hall was the
same Britain that had endeavored to frustrate them at
birth? Knotty questions, which brought factional brawling
in their train, dividing public sentiment from Massa-

FUR AND TEA 69

chusetts to Georgia. Your Federalist, with his aristocrati-
cal tradition, was all for freedom in decency, but he re-
pudiated Madame Guillotine and saw nothing praise-
worthy in decapitating fat, stupid Louis and blonde, in-
sipid Marie Antoinette. And he was much more prejudiced
in favor of Britain, racially akin, than a pack of grinning,
murdering, monkey-faced Mounseers — damned peasants,
sir! Papists, by God, when they ain’t worshippin’ this
Goddess of Reason. He firmly believed that Robespierre
drank the blood of aristocrats, and Marat bathed in it.
Napoleon, when he bobbed out of the smoke of the guns
that blasted the last barricade, was equally anathema, an
upstart, worse, an Italian upstart, later, an insult to the
aristocratical tradition, in that he erected a tinsel monarchy
of adventurers and place-buyers. But on this last point
most of the Democrats agreed with the Federalists, for
in their eyes the Corsican was as tainted as the Bourbons —
or the Federalists — ^with the aristocratical virus, and how-
ever much they hated to be at one with their political
enemies, they couldn’t stomach Napoleonic France.

Up to this point the Federalists, the aristocratical tradi-
tion, had acted as balance-wheel to regulate the nation’s
sanity. But the Federalists spun off on a tangent, in their
turn, developing an exaggerated, an unnatural, loyalty to
Britain and the ancient coimection with the mother coun-
try, which became the more confirmed as the transitory in-
tellectual sympathy for France was dissipated. They
condoned Britain’s interference with American commerce,
partly a result of the determination of American mer-
chants to evade the blockade by means of which the British
Admiralty attempted to shut off France and the countries
subject to her from the world’s trade, and partly a product
of British jealousy of the increase of American shipping
and consequent growth of American overseas trade. They
became more and more out of touch with informed public
opinion, and in the War of 1812, made the crucial mis-
take of adopting an attitude of frank disloyalty.

70 JOHN JACOB AST OR

As a political party, this ruined them. As an aristocrati-
cal tradition, they managed to linger on until the triumph
of Andrew Jackson definitely put the frontier Democracy
in the saddle, and drove gentility out of fashion in politics
and business, if not in society. But while they lasted, they
exerted an important influence upon American progress,
on the whole, a healthful influence. It would have been a
good thing, probably, if they had been able to exert their
influence a few decades longer, particularly in business.
We should have had less of the cut-throat, conscienceless,
rowdy element, who dominated finance and industry
throughout the middle years of the nineteenth century,
and the country’s economic evolution must have been
proportionately sounder, if not so rapid. But such specu-
lations are futile. It is idle to expect good judgment from
the aristocratical tradition. It is as spontaneous and uncon-
trolled in its actions as the growth of a protoplasm, doing
good, I dare say, by accident, and harm by misfortune.

I have gone to these lengths to analyze it because it was
an essential factor in moulding the background of affairs
in the years when John Jacob Astor was striking out from
the path he knew into remote and dangerous fields. In
New York City it was all-powerful in business, and what
passed for society, and contested politics, at first, evenly,
afterwards with the unflagging determination of a com-
pact minority.^ He, Jacob, was not born to this tradition,
but of it. His German background and training had
stamped its precepts on his brain, while a pronounced vein
of personal egotism — almost an invariable characteristic
of great men in all walks of life — ^made him desirous of
utilizing it to emphasize the authority and prestige he ac-
quired. He had very little, if any, democratic instinct, not-
withstanding that only a democracy could have afforded
him the opportunity he exploited} and he studied events
rather with an eye to their possible use for his purposes
than in curiosity as to their reaction upon the body of man-

’ See note at end of chapter.

FUR AND TEA 71

kind. He was bigoted, self-assured, vain — ^in a peculiarly
bland, childish fashion — opinionated, narrow-minded and
entirely selfish, where his family was not concerned. Traits
which became more and more confirmed as his confidence
in himself increased. An arrant individualist. Conserva-
tive, distrustful of people in the mass.

In fine, the essence of the aristocratical tradition, this
German peasant, who, whatever his vague ancestors may
have been, was bred in the atmosphere of the slaughter-
house and until his middle years was ignorant of the nice-
ties of life. As he forges ahead, clutching avariciously at
every chance of wealth he encounters, you will see the
tradition clamping tighter its hold upon him. He was never
working for the community, for the country. He had no
sense of social obligation. He worked for John Jacob
Astor — ^for the Astor name. Give him credit for that.
Strictly speaking, the name came first. It must be a sym-
bol of power, as trenchant a symbol as a coat-of-arms.
And in fur, in tea, in real estate, wherever he cast his
nets, he aimed to be supreme, autocratical.', Above all, he
loathed dividing his profits, and he would squeeze the
last penny out of anyone dealing with him. But — and this
is the vital clue to his character — he never knew the re-
verse side of the aristocratical tradition: the obligations of
gentility, the warm courtesy, the kindly deference, the
appraisal of money as a vehicle to a certain end, not the
end, itself. He was never, in the finer sense of the word,
a gentleman.

There is an amusing anecdote which suggests this as-
pect of his personality, as well as the lovableness which
radiated from him in the family circle. After he had
achieved prosperity, he brought over from Germany his
sister Catherine, a bright, witty woman, never a respecter
of persons. She had married George Ehninger, a distiller
of cordials, who came with her, and resumed his business
in New York, much to the disgust of Jacob, who, as a ris-
ing merchant, wasn’t anxious to be known as brother-in-

72 JOHN JACOB AST OR

law of a distiller. Some such comment by the head of the
family was repeated to Catherine, who stuck her nose in
the air and announced to anyone who happened to be lis-
tening in Broadway:

“Humph! Yakob vas nodding vunce himself but a pak-
er’s poy, undt soldt preadt undt cake in der street.”

A remark which upset him even more than the recol-
lection of his brother-in-law’s occupation. But the corollary
to it is that he respected Catherine’s independence, and
refused to nourish resentment against her. Personally, he
could be amazingly petty, and that was the side the world
usually saw. There was another side, which was withheld
from all except Sarah and the children and a handful of
relations — who, incidentally, with the exceptions of Sarah
and Catherine Ehninger, were as devoted to the aristo-
cratical tradition as the chief of their clan. Good, hard-
boiled Junkers, these Astors, you might infer, and con-
template more favorably the authenticity of that Astorga
genealogy. But I wouldn’t be too severe with them — or
Germany. America has stimulated the aristocratical tradi-
tion in pants-makers from the ghetto of Bucharest.

I cannot resist quoting fully from “The Old Merchants
of New York,” Walter Barrett’s disquisition on the
mercantile aristocracy of the city as it existed during the
first half of the Nineteenth Century and until the social
upheavals following the Civil War. He has just the right
touch of delightful snobbery and race consciousness — ^you
find the identical feeling, for instance, in the Siexir Geof-
frey de Villehardouin’s description of the robber barons
who partidpated in the Fourth Crusade:

“There is an old aristocracy in this dty, which is not
generally understood. There is no class of society so dilfi-
cult to approach or reach. This class makes no noise, no
fuss, nor is it at all pretentious. If one has qualities and
attributes that will place him at the firesides of the old
set, he will there find all solid and substantial, but no

PpR AND TEA 73

gingerbread or mushroom work. The sideboard is deep
shaded, because it is old solid mahogany. On it are real
cut glasses, decanters, and solid silver salvers. The wines
are old and pure. There are apples, cakes, cider, and hick-
ory nuts. The habits of the olden time are kept up. The
young man in this set courts the fair girl of the same
level, as in the olden time. Origin causes no mark of dis-
tinction in this old society. It comprises all countries — old
Knickerbocker families or those descended from the
original Netherland settlers — from the old English fami-
lies, who took part in the Revolution as Whigs — ^those who
rose to distinction and political power under the American
Constitution or during the war, as Generals, or before and
during the war as signers of the Declaration of Independ-
ence, members of the Continental Congress, or framers
of the Constitution.

“Among the Dutch names that claim rights among the
old clique I allude to are found the Van Rensselaers, Le-
Roys, Schuylers, Stuyvesants, Beeckmans, Bleeckers,
Strykers, Aoithonys, Van Waggennens, Van Vleicks,
Cregiers, Laurenses, WyckoflFs, Van ClifFs, Gouverneurs,
Stenwycks, Janceys, DePeysters, Nevinses, Ruyters, Van
Wycks, HoflFmans, Van Cortlandts, Provosts, Kipps, Ver-
plancks, De Kays, Dyckmans, Vermilyeas, Bensons, Van
Schaicks, De Forrests, Van Zandts, Brevoorts, Marvinses,
Vances, Van Horns, etc.

“The English descendants and Puritan stock are mixed
up with the old Dutch breed in forming the highest class
of society, though not the most showy. Originally the set
went to New England, and came straggling into New
York City in the course of years. They pioneered in the
excitement that led to the American Revolution and took
an active part in the seven years war. There were such
names as Kent, Jay, Alsop, Lawrence, Laight, Hicks,
Phoenix, Post, Perit, Thurston, Jones, Wetmore, Hays,
Woodward, Bard, Walton, Fleming, Delaney, Cruger,

74 JOHN JACOB AST OR

Marshall, Gibbs, Deming, Clarkson, Newbold, Fuller,
Scott, Beach, Aspinwall, Curtiss, Waddington, Brooks,
Gracie, Savage, Barclay, Goodhue, Grinnell, Ogden, How-
land, Davis, Macy, Morton, Ray, Whitlock, Ward, King,
Sands, and others. Another class of the old set are descend-
ants of Huguenots who came here prior to the Revolution
— ^Lorillard, Seguine, Masier, Delaplaine, Latourette,
Law, De la Montagne, Jumel, Depau, De Rham, Pintard,
Delevan, and Purdy.

“It was from these names the managers of the ‘Bache-
lor Balls’ were taken thirty years ago. Then the City
Hotel, located on the block in Broadway above Trinity
Yard, was the only headquarters of the pure, genuine
aristocracy of which we speak.”

While the above lists are substantially accurate and
comprise a very fair digest of the swank families of an-
cient Gotham, “Barrett” lets his customary quota of errors
slip in. Jumel was an emigre, who came over in 1798.
The first De Rham, Henry C., arrived from Switzerland
in 1806. The Barclays were British subjects, hereditary
Consuls to the Crown. The list of families of English
stock is as notable for names left out as for those included
— for instance, the Hones, who are mentioned frequently
in this book and of whom Philip, especially, was among
the most distinguished leaders of society from the dawn
of the century until his death in 18515 the Irvings, the
Minturns, the Swords, the Moores — one of whom, Clem-
ent, wrote “The Night Before Christmas” 5 the Murrays,
descendants of “Quaker” Murray, of Mxirray Hill, who
owned one of the five coaches the town could boast on the
eve of the Revolution 5 the Livingstons, the Lenoxes, the
Goelets, the Griswolds, the Coopers, the Bloodgoods and
the Costers.

Even of the Dutch he leaves out the Remsens, Rut-
gers, and Roosevelts, three sturdy clans that left their
imprint upon city, state, and nation.

FUR AND TEA

Toward the close of the eighteenth century Jacob found
himself with a cellar full of extra fine pelts, unsalable in
the American market in bulk. Packed carefully in barrels,
under the immediate supervision either of Sarah or him-
self, they represented the cream of several seasons’ col-
lections, put aside with no very clear idea of what should
be done with them, merely an anticipation of turning a
profit in the future. Each time he counted over the lus-
trous contents of a barrel — ^mink, otter, silver-fox, marten,
wolverine — ^he’d grumble to Sarah at the idle capital
represented.

“Vot do we make of dem? Noddings!”

Sarah suggested the obvious solution: ship them to Lon-
don for disposition. But at this time Jacob hadn’t a regu-
lar agent in England, and was loath to commit such valu-
able furs to a dealer of which he wasn’t sure. Finally,
he determined to go himself. He’d get a better price than
any dealer would, he argued, in addition to saving the
dealer’s commission and gaining an opportimity to examine
the London market and visit George Peter and his uncle.
Sarah thought it an excellent plan. To tell the truth, she
was worried about Jacob. He had evinced, in recent years,
a tendency to restlessness when Spring came around. He’d
leave his work in the shop suddenly, without rhyme or
reason, and disappear for an hour or two, returning to
talk with unaccustomed garrulity of the forest runners
and the unknown lands beyond the Mississippi. And as
summer dragged along he’d become irritable and snap-
pish, which wasn’t at all like him. So Sarah, wise wife,
encouraged the London voyage. A man like her Jacob,
she knew, needed new contacts to stimulate his energetic
mind.

If Sarah approved, that was all he asked. He appointed
her to manage the business in his absence, and took ship
for London, apparently in the Spring of 1799 — the
steerage!. There is something pathetic about this instance

76 JOHN JACOB AST OR '

of parsimoniousness. For parsimoniousness it was. He was
well to do, nowise cramped for money. Andhe wasn’t suffi-
cient of a sentimentalist to think of repeating the sensations
of the emigrant-boy of fifteen years past — to return as
he had come. No, he was just saving money because sav-
ing money had become a habit with him, and he wasn’t as
yet used to the moderate degree of luxury which consid-
erations of business, as much as his family’s comfort, com-
pelled him to adopt. A striking illustration of the perver-
sion which often springs from exaggeration of the most
laudable traits. Born to poverty, Jacob in youth had en-
forced upon himself the utmost care in all expenditures.
Money was as his life-blood. He denied himself ordinary
wants in order to acquire more of it, to be able to pay his
bills without recourse to Heinrich or Nathanial Prime.
A dollar saved was more than a dollar earned. It repre-
sented an enlargement of the scope of his enterprise, and
money invested was even more precious, for it constituted a
guarantee against the specter of poverty always lurking
in the background of his subconscious mind.

And what was the consequence of his rigid self-denial?
A respect for money, which gradually became more than
respect, as the instinct so carefully and honorably cul-
tivated became increasingly dominant in his character.
Parsimoniousness turned into acquisitiveness and acquisi-
tiveness developed a passion for hoarding, and hoarding,
once it was a confirmed habit, created the churlish penuri-
ousness of the miser. Money! Ever5^hing was money.
Nothing else counted or mattered. Nothing must be per-
mitted to stand in the way of money, of procuring more
money, of squeezing the utmost amount of interest out of
the money already possessed, of guarding and preserving
all the money in his coffers. Not Nathanial Prime, him-
self, was half so miserly as Jacob was to become under
the lash of habit.^ Who remembers Prime today? Who

^ Yet Prime -was the more consistent character. In old age, obsessed by
an unreasoning fear of poverty, he cut his own throat with a razor.

FUR AND TEA 77

remembered him fifty years after Jacob’s voyage to Lon-
don, when “Old Astor” was the best-hated man in New
York, perhaps in the country? Poor Jacob! He was the
slave of his own virtue, warped and swollen out of re-
semblance to the honorable purpose from which it sprang.

But here we are again, peeking over the horizon of life,
as though we had booked a passage in Mr. Wells’ “Time
Machine” instead of the smelly, rat-infested ’tween-decks
of a London packet-ship, which seemed comfortable
enough to Jacob after the ^rt and smoke and vermin of
Indian lodges and the wet and cold of lean-tos on forest
trails. He had a fair passage, and landing at Greenwich,
ordered his barrels of peltry lightered ashore, and carted
them straightway to the purlieus of the city, where they
were disposed of with a celerity beyond his expectations.
He had known, of course, the principal fur-dealers, and
wasted no time in procuring bids. The quality of his goods
did the rest. They were a better consignment, of a more
uniform grade of excellence, than the London market had
seen. So Jacob stuffed a handsome letter of credit in his
pocket, and sauntered up the Cheap one fine morning with
several weeks on his hands before his ship was due to sail
on the westward voyage.

He had called on George Peter and his unde before
this, and resumed acquaintanceship with other friends of
his years in the Astor & Broadwood factory. The time re-
maining to him he determined to utilize in meeting as
many merchants as possible, and learning all he could
about every commodity which came from America or could
be exported to it, prices, soxxrces of supply, markets, con-
ditions regulating production, variances in grading. Up and
down, in and out, he wandered through the narrow tangle
of streets that radiated from the hub of old St. Paul’s, mak-
ing friends in coffee houses, effecting introductions through
these friends to other merchants, pushing his way by sheer
personality into counting-rooms where he wasn’t known.
And day by day, his thorough German mind was accumu-

78 JOHN JACOB AST OR

lating and arranging facts, storing them for reference,
comparing and contrasting them.

Unfortunately, the only record of those days comes
from him, and it must have been colored by failing mem-
ory and the childish egotism which I have referred to
previously. It is, as I shall show, at least partially apoc-
ryphal, but if we cross-check it as thoroughly as he cross-
checked the business facts he thought worthy of retention
in his mind we shan’t go very wrong in estimating its true
value. Certainly, the main adventure of his London visit
was the turning-point of his career, although he didn’t
recognize it as such at the moment, and probably was
led to romance about it in his old age for that very reason.

One day near the end of his stay, he was passing East
India House, the headquarters of that amazing enterprise
in commercial imperialism which had won, and adminis-
tered, the immense British possessions in India: a company
which held kingdoms and principalities in fee, which made
treaties as a sovereign, which maintained armies and
waged war. This apotheosis of merchantry intrigued
Jacob’s interest, and he tarried to question the porter at
the entrance about the organization of so mammoth a
corporation. How did it operate? Who controlled its oper-
ations? There was a Court of Directors, explained the
porter — ^impressed, as all men were, by the serious earnest-
ness of this casual wayfarer. And under the Court of
Directors was a Governor, whom the porter mentioned
by name, a German name, which Jacob recalled as belong-
ing to a boy slightly older than himself, a Heidelberg
student, who had gone abroad in search of fortune as he
had. Yes, assented the porter, the Governor had come
from Germany as a lad. Why, then, he must be the same
boy, Jacob decided, and with this for excuse, persuaded the
porter to send in his own name to the great man.

To the porter’s surprise, he was admitted, and the Gov-
ernor recognized him, treated him kindly, invited him to
dinner and asked if there was any service Jacob required.

FUR AND TEA 79

Unfortunately, Jacob realized, he was not equipped with
clothes to dine at a table so grand as he was sure the
Governor’s wovild be, so he must decline the invitation,
also the offer of service, for his furs were disposed of,
and the money he had received already invested in trade-
goods to be shipped to his agents on the frontier. But
the Governor would not suffer him to depart without
promising to return, and on the occasion of this farewell
visit presented him a little packet, with the brief remark:
“Take this, my friend. You may find it of value.” Jacob
thanked him, a thought bewilderedly, and they separated
with mutual expressions of esteem: two German exiles,
happier for having recovered momentarily a glimpse
of boyhood days in the kind land they never ceased to
love. It hadn’t occured to Jacob that there might be an
advantage to himself in the meeting, and he was at a loss
upon opening the packet to discover its contents to be
a “Canton Prices Current” and Permit No. 68, issued by
the Honorable the East India Company to Jacob Astor,
of New York City, in the United States of America, au-
thorizing any ship which carried it to trade at ports con-
trolled by the Company. Jacob had no intention of trad-
ing to the East Indies} his one purpose was to extend the
web of agents and traders he was weaving across the for-
ests and streams of the Western fur countries. So he
tucked the documents into a pocket, with the reflection that
his friend the Governor had meant well, and forgot them
until he was home in New York, discussing his travels with
Sarah.

Sarah could think for herself, as you must have noticed
before now. She demanded to see the Permit and the
Prices Current.

“Why, they buy fxirs in Canton,” she exclaimed, study-
ing the latter.

“What use is dot to us?” he countered. “We have no
ship.”

“Charter one,” she suggested.

8o JOHN JACOB AST OR

But that would cost too much money, he objected. A
dangerous venture.

“There is Mr. James Livermore,” she said. “He has
several big ships, Jacob, in the West Indian trade, and
this trouble with the French has kept them in port. Why
don’t you ask him to go into partnership with you in a
China venture?”

For the first time, Jacob was seriously impressed with
the importance of the Governor’s present.

“Dot’s a goodt idea,” he conceded. “Ja, I talk to Liver-
more.”

Livermore, with his West India trade crippled by the
depredations of French men-o’-war and privateers, which
were seizing American vessels plying to the British pos-
sessions, exactly as the British seized American vessels at-
tempting to enter or leave French ports, was impressed
by Aster’s proposition of a venture to the East Indies.

“What’s yoiu: offer, Mr. Astor?” he asked.

“You furnish a ship mit der cargo,” Jacob answered
prompdy. “I loan you der Permit. One-half der profits
to me.”

“You don’t risk a cent?” Livermore exclaimed with
indignation.

“I loan you der Permit. Mit dot der ship goes any-
where.”

“I won’t do it,” asserted the West India merchant. “It
isn’t a fair bargain.”

They argued a while, without either of them yielding,
and that was as far as they got. Jacob went home, his
documents still in his pocket, and nothing happened for
some days. In the interval, Livermore reconsidered the
project; Astor’s offer seemed fairer in retrospect, and
he was worried over the prospect of his ships lying idle
indefinitely. The country was practically at war with
France. Congress had authorized the seizure of hostile
French vessels, suspended commercial intercourse and
legislated for a provisional army, of which General Wash-

FUR AND TEA

ington was commander until his death in December, 1799.
Any venture that promised to take a vessel into seas
not ravaged by the two major combatants was reasonably
safe, and the East India Company’s Permit insured her
against British interference. He seems to have given much
weight to this latter circumstance, to have believed that
the Permit would confer extraordinary opportunities for
trade, denied other American vessels — vindicating he was
very gullible, if it is true.

But whether true or not, Livermore did call upon Astor,
and accept the original terms. His largest ship was laden
with a cargo of ginseng, lead and scrap-iron and $30,000
in Spanish silver in her strong-box. No furs were listed
in her manifest, which may indicate that Jacob was too
doubtful of the venture to risk more than the two docu-
ments which had cost him nothing. And early in 1800 she
put to sea, taking the route of the East Indiamen, via St.
Helena to the Cape of Good Hope. For rnore than a
year nothing was heard of her, during which time Jacob
proceeded with the extension of his fur-trade in the West,
while Livermore strode his counting-room and chewed his
nails, and wished he’d taken a few thousands extra from
the underwriters. Then, when both of them had decided
she was gone, the Indiaman lumbered in past the Hook
and came to anchor under Governors Island. Livermore,
prepared for the worst, nearly fainted when he heard his
captain’s report. The ginseng, which had cost twenty cents
a pound in New York, was sold for $3.50 in Canton; the
lead went for ten cents a pound and the iron fetched
higher prices. The proceeds of the sale of the cargo, plus
the $30,000 in the strong-box, the captain had put in
tea, which Livermore experienced no difficulty in dispos-
ing of at a profit of a dollar a pound.

Some weeks later a dray drove up to the Astor store,
then at 68 Pine Street, and delivered a number of very
heavy little kegs which chinked faintly as they were
rolled in through the door.

82 JOHN JACOB AST OR

“What on earth are those, Jacob?” Sarah demanded
when she happened in during the afternoon.

“Der fruits of our East India pass,” he answered, his
deep-set eyes twinkling merrily.

“Money?”

He nodded.

“Ho-how much?”

“Fifty-five t’ousan’ dollar.”

“Jacob!” she gasped.

And well she might. It was as rich a coup as he ever
achieved. So rich that he decided to enter the Canton
trade for himself — ^which suggests an examination of the
credibility of this whole story of Permit No. 68 and the
“Canton Prices Cxarrent,” as told by Jacob and handed
down by his descendants. Quite a yarn, you will see.

Ill

The truth is that John Company had no more authority
in Canton than Jacob, himself, while American vessels
were free to trade where they pleased in the British do-
minions, even at the ports of India which the Company
did control. By a decree of the Emperor Yung Ching,
issued in 1745, the Fan-Kwae, or Foreign Devils, were
restricted to the use of the one port of Canton, open to all
of them so long as they observed the stringent “Eight
Regulations” and paid the outrageous customs fees and
cumshaws demanded. And although the British Govern-
ment could, and did, forbid vessels of British registry,
other than those in the East India Company’s fleet, to
trade in the Far East, American vessels were never re-
quired to recognize the Company’s monopoly and plied
at will to Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, so soon as the
Treaty of Paris had acknowledged the independence of
the United States.

More, American vessels proved a thorn in the side of
the Company through their success in trading between
the Company’s ports — ^running cargoes, for instance, from

FUR AND TEA 83

Madras to Calcutta, and then ferrying a second lading to
Colombo in Ceylon, returning to Rangoon to pick up a
load for Bombay, whence they would clear for home.
With a most un-British forebearance, the powers of East
India House tolerated this latter invasion of the Com-
pany’s prerogatives until 1811, when they secured from
His Majesty’s Government an Order in Council forbid-
ding American vessels to make any save direct voyages
between India and the United States. Not until 1834, and
then in desperation over the increasing competition of the
United States in the Indian market, should Parliament
remove the Company’s monopoly and make the East
Indies free to all British shipping. What a harvest our
Yankees had reaped in the meantime!

Americans were not slow in recognizing the possibili-
ties of profit in the East India trade. We were a nation
of tea-drinkers, and we had been on short rations since the
Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773. It was almost
exacdy ten years to a day after that rowdy demonstration
of patriotism, and the ink was scarcely dry on the treaty
of peace, when the fifty-five-ton sloop Harriet, of Hing-
ham, Hallet master, sailed from Boston with a cargo of
ginseng for China 5 but Captain Hallet was saved full
half his voyage, for, stopping at Capetown for wood and
water, he encountered the master of a homeward-bound
British East Indiaman, who, out of the private venture
which all officers of the Company’s ships were allowed,
purchased the ginseng for twice its weight in Hyson. The
honor of first displaying the Stars and Stripes in the Far
East was reserved for the ship, Empress of China, fitted
out by a group — ^what nowadays we should call a syn-
dicate— of New York merchants, who entrusted the
direction of the voyage to the supercargo, an unusual ar-
rangement, to be explained by the personality of this
functionary. Major Samuel Shaw, a young Boston mer-
chant who had served with distinction in the Massachu-
setts Line. To Shaw must go the credit for establishmg

84 'JOHN JACOB ASTOR

our first foothold in the lucrative China trade. He was
an early captain of industry, whose premature death
denied Him the measure of fame and wealth his talents
merited.

The Empress of China sailed from New York in Febru-
ary, 1784; she came to ofF Macao August 23, took on a
Chinese pilot and tacked slowly up-river for thirty miles
to the Bogue narrows, girdled by forts, where an officer
of the Banner in garrison boarded her for military scru-
tiny. Passed by him, she sailed more tediously up the re-
maining thirty miles of the twisting channel to the famous
Pagoda Anchorage off Whampoa, the foreign suburb of
Canton, which lay several miles further upstream. Here,
along the shore, were built the rambling godowns — ^vari-
ously translated as factories or warehouses — of the
thirteen Hong merchants, the intermediaries officially
designated by the Emperor to conduct all transactions
with the despised Fan-Kwae, whose absurd costumes, xm-
couth habits and pungent body-smell disgusted the fas-
tidious Chinese. Over the several godowns waved the
flags of Britain, Holland, Spain, Denmark, and Sweden}
and in the stream lay vessels representing all these na-
tions, tall, frigate-built ships, manned by crews as numer-
ous as a man-o^-war’s, their lofty bulwarks pierced for
imposing batteries of cannon. Amongst these noble craft
squattered huge tea-junks, Itunber- junks, rice-junks, ris-
ing high at bow and stern, brown matting sails creaking
stiffly, slant-eyed crews all sneering curiosity. And to and
fro darted myriads of sampans, large and small, yelping,
singsong voices summoning a passage.

A fascinating spectacle for the first Americans who
witnessed it. No less amusing the elaborate ceremonies
which followed: the visit of the Imperial Linguist, cus-
toms inspector and official interpreter combined, personal
representative of that awesome official, the Grand Hoppo,
who, in due course, to a solemn clanging of gongs, rowed
alongside in his barge of state, attended by the Hong mer-

The Pagoda Anchorage at Whampoa
{From an old Chinese Painting)

FUR AND TEA

chant who was to represent the newly arrived ship and
act as security for it and the behavior of its crew. The
Hoppo was the Emperor’s superintendent of the foreign
trade, and few Mandarins attained his power or wealth.
Silken-clad, portly, inscrutable, he was as likely as not to
have an infantile passion for Connecticut clocks or old
madeira. Rapacity was his watchword. His the task to
oversee the crowning ceremony of “Cumshaw and Meas-
urement,” by which the port charges, customs dues, and
authorized blackmail were estimated.

While all watched with bated breath, his subordinates
stretched a measuring tape from the ship’s rudderpost to
her foremast, and then across her waist just abaft the
mainmast. Followed much nodding of heads, daubing of
brushes at ink-blocks, scrawling of weird idiographs on
yellow ricepaper, the result of which was a multiplica-
tion of the two measurements to secure the total number
of “covids” in the ship. The “covid” multiplied by so
many taels per “covid” gave the ordinary measurement
fee or customs duties. But to the ordinary fee must be
added one hundred per cent for “cumshaw” — ^an untrans-
latable word, wider than graft, deeper than dishonesty,
more inclusive than plunder} fifty per cent for the Hop-
po’s “opening barriers fee”} ten per cent to the superin-
tendent of the Imperial Treasury — ^this ten per cent to
cover “transport of duty to Pekin and weighing in Impe-
rial scales”} seven per cent to adjust difference in weight
between Canton and Pekin systems} and one-fifth of one
per cent “for work of converting” all cumshaws into
definite taels. A sorry tael — ^if you will pardon one sorely
tempted. On a ship of three hundred tons, which was
about the size of the Em'press of China, the taxes would
approach $3,500, a relatively enormous, indeed, prepos-
terous, sum, which foreigners could afford to pay only
because of the equally enormous and preposterous profits
to be earned by a China voyage.

The Hong merchant Major Shaw selected to represent

86 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

him was the celebrated Pinqua, friend and confident in
years to come of dozens of American skippers, supercar-
goes, and merchants. After the tax had been calculated,
Pinqua signed a bond for the Hoppo guaranteeing its pay-
ment, whereupon the Hoppo issued the ship a “permit to
open hatches.” The next step was the discharging of the
cargo, which was lightered to Pinqua’s godown, measured
and weighed there by officials of the Hoppo’s office, and
finally sold. While this was going forward Shaw arranged
with the Hong merchant for his return cargo, mostly tea,
with a quantity of silks, cinnamon, and china ware. The
lading took three or four months as a rule, the new crop
of tea not being ready until November, which meant that
the Empress of China sailed for home about the end of
the year. It was seldom that a Canton voyage took less
than fifteen months. But the profit, as has been said, was
enormous. So rich, in the case of the Empress of China,
that other ship-owners were led to repeat it. Shaw, him-
self, sailed a second time in 1786, with the honorary title
of United States Consul at Canton, aboard the ship Hope
of New York, James Magee master, charged by his syn-
dicate with the establishment of the first American com-
mercial house in China. He had rented a godown and
hoisted his flag beside the ensigns of the great trading
nations of Europe when the Empress of China arrived on
her second voyage, and not long afterward, the ship
Grand Turk, of Salem, Ebenezer West master, one of the
fleet of the enterprising Elias Hasket Derby — “King’^
Derby to his contemporaries.

The Derby family, luckily, have preserved the records
of their ancestor’s commercial campaigns, so that we may
learn from them what an early Canton trader’s manifest
was like. The Grand Turk carried in her hold, when she
warped into Derby Wharf, May 22, 1787:^

^ “The Log of the Grand Turks, ” by Robert E. Peabody; Houghton
Mifflin Company, Boston, 1826.

FUR AND TEA 87

240 chests Bohea Tea 1 .

17554 chests Bohea Tea/ ?I7>5I0

2 chests Hyson Tea 95

52 “ Souchong Tea 521

32 Bohea Congo Tea 459

130 “ Cassia 779

10 “ Cassia Bud 85

75 Boxes China I5923

945 Ox Hides Ij050

100 Shammy Skins 1

50 Buck SHns > 184

130 Ordinary Hides )

10 Casks Wine 568

I Box paper 44

$23,218

Adventures :

13 chests Bohea Tea $650

6 “ Canzo 300

6 boxes China 135

24 pkgs. Bandanna Hdkfs 72

24 chests of Muslins

$1,157

It should be remarked that the hides and skins included
in the Grand Turh^s manifest were taken aboard at Cape-
town. The “Adventures” were the private ventures of the
ship^s officers j for some reason, the “24 Chests of Mus-
lins” are not valued in Captain West’s record. The cargo
was sold by Derby at a figure, unspecified, which enabled
him to make a profit of one hundred per cent on the out-
going cargo, valued by him at $31,000 — ^the difference
between the $31,000 in goods exported and the $23,218
actually expended abroad for the return cargo repre-
senting expenses, customs fees and losses on inddental
lyafficking. Ope_ hundred per cent was not an abnormal

88 JOHN JACOB AST OR

profit in the early period of the Canton trade. Many
years later thirty per cent was regarded as a very con-
servative return on a China voyage, and by this time com-
petition was flooding both markets.

I have gone at some length into the initiation of the
Canton trade because of the bearing these facts have upon
Astor’s outrageous bargain with Livermore. Fourteen years
before Livermore’s ship dropped anchor oflF Whampoa,
merchants in New York, Salem, and Boston must have
known that they need take no heed to the East India
Company, either in China or in India or the innumerable
islands dotting the seas northward to where Japan lurked
sulkily behind a barrier of prejudice. There were men in
New York, when Jacob returned from London with Per-
mit No. 68, who had made small fortunes trafficking be-
tween the Indian ports which John Company held as a
sovereign. When Major Shaw visited Calcutta in 1794
on the voyage which was to be his last, he found Ben-
jamin Joy, an old friend in Boston, conducting a mercan-
tile business for American traders. A Salem merchant,
Thomas Lechmere, became an Alderman of Bombay.
Salem shipowners, before the end of the century, were
clamoring angrily against the insurance rate on their ves-
sels from Calcutta to the Sand Heads, at the mouth of the
Hoogly — sixteen per cent, in recognition of the trick-
eries of the channel, the tidal bores and the occasional
violence of the monsoon. From the Sand Heads to Ham-
biurg the coverage was but eight per cent.

Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Canton, were as familiar
to American skippers as Liverpool, Rio de Janeiro, Cadiz,
or Copenhagen. Not only was this so, but American mer-
chants, and notably, Boston merchants, more than ten
years before Livermore’s ship beat out past Sandy Hook,
were addressing themselves shrewdly to solution of the
problem of maintaining the Canton trade on something
approaching equality with the British, whose Eastern
possessions produced various staples for which there was

FUR AND TEA 89

an active demand in China — opium, mummie, sharks’
fins, edible birds’ nests, the cheaper grades of Indian
cloth — ^whereas practically the only domestic product the
Americans could sell profitably to the Hong merchants
was ginseng, the supply of which was limited. Both Brit-
ish and Americans were obliged to rely mainly upon coined
silver for trading purposes, and silver was an especially
uneconomic article of trade for Americans because of their
perpetual shortage of specie, which, of itself, arbitrarily
hindered the circulation of commerce at home.

It is a tribute to American ingenuity that the Bostonians
hit upon a medium of exchange, which compensated their
original handicap and enabled them to conduct the trade
advantageously until the birth of the industrial era per-
mitted the United States to create new markets in China.
In doing so, too, they anticipated Astor’s most dramatic
undertaking, opening the path which was to lead him to
millions, although he never expressed appreciation of their
pioneer efforts. On the contrary, arrogating to himself
credit for doing what other men had made possible. And
this is said, remember, with no intent to deprecate the
commercial genius which carried him to the pinnacle of
success — SL success achieved deservedly by bold use of tac-
tics lesser men practised feebly or maladroitly.

Major Shaw had observed during his first stay at Can-
ton that there was a steady demand for furs. The Hong
merchants complained they could never obtain enough.
Their only soiirces of supply were itinerant English trad-
ers, who occasionally fetched in a shipload of Alaskan sea-
otter bartered from the fierce Indian tribes of the islands
north of Puget Soimd. Attention had been focused recently
on these tribes and the rocky coast which fostered them,
by the publication of the account of Captain Cook’s third
voyage and John Ledyard’s report on the Russian fur-
trade in Bering Sea. And a group of American merchants,
putting the scattered evidence together, decided there
should be profit in a trade over the route Boston-North-

90 JOHN JACOB AST OR

west Coast-Canton. Ships would sail from home with a
cargo of goods to be exchanged with the Indians for furs,
which would be carried across the Pacific to Canton and
there exchanged for tea, silks, nankeens, and the bright
willow-ware, to be the favorite breakfast china of genera-
tions of Americans yet unborn.

This group — ^Joseph Barrell, Samuel Brown, and
Crowell Hatch, merchants of Boston} Charles Bulfinch,
the architect, who hadn’t yet clinched his right to fame
with the Tontine Crescent} John Derby, younger son of
"King” Derby, of Salem} and J. M. Pintard, of New
York — raised $49,000 to outfit the ship Columbia, John
Kendrick master, and the ninety-ton sloop Lady Washing-
ton, Robert Gray master, which sailed from Boston Sep-
tember 30, 1787, for Nootka Sound on the island of Van-
couver, a region then as mysterious to Americans as the
High Atlas is today. No more was heard of the expedi-
tion for three years. It was August 9, 1790, when the
Columbia sailed proudly into port, the first American ves-
sel to circumnavigate the globe. Captain Gray, who was
in command of her, reported that Captain Kendrick had
remained on the Northwest Coast, with the Lady Wash-
ington, to establish a trading-post, and his backers allowed
him no more leisure than was required to unload cargo
and overhaul his ship before they sent him out again to
brave the Horn and belt the continents. It was on this
second voyage. May 12, 1792, to be exact, that, sighting
“appearance of a spacious harbour abreast the Ship,” the
Columbia discovered and entered the river which bears
her name. About the same time, the indefatigable Captain
Kendrick, in the miniature Lady W ashington, was carry-
ing the first cargo of sandalwood from the Sandwich
(Hawaiian, we call them nowadays) Islands to Canton,
thus inaugurating another trade, which would help the
Americans to offset the fat cargoes of Indian opium form-
ing the mainstay of British commerce with China.

The Northwest trade, as it. was. dqbbed, grew rapidly.

FUR AND TEA 91

Hard on the heels of the Columbia sailed the brigantines
Hope and Hancock and the ship Margaret, precursors of
dozens of sturdy, little craft, which took for granted the
logging of forty thousand miles in the two or three years
they must remain away from home, running south with the
trades, beating around the Horn, then north the length
of South America, up the North American coast to the
foggy waters which lapped the jagged shores of Puget
Sound and the fiords beyond, where dwelt hosts of treach-
erous Indians, always alert for pillage and massacre. A
dangerous trade. These Northwesters were armed man-
o’-war fashion. They bristled with cannon, and the in-
stant a fleet of long, wooden canoes put out around some
spiny headland, the crews were mustered to quarters,
boarding-nettings rigged, great guns cast loose, muskets
and pistols primed, regardless of the heaps of furs freely
displayed by the approaching savages.

Even so, there were occasions when vigilance was lulled
asleep, and war-clubs won a chance to gut a ship.

But a Northwester’s voyage was only half-completed
after she had crammed her holds with the glossy black
pelts of the sea-otter, each five feet by two, and whatever
other prime furs the natives offered. Now, she must haul
her wind, and claw off a coast as treacherous as its in-
habitants, and bearing south by east, wing out into the
wide waters of the Pacific, breaking the monotony of
months afloat by visits to the palm-crowned islets which
lifted unexpectedly above the horizon. It was North-
westers, who, first of Americans, visited Hawaii and the
Marquesas, the Fijis and the Gilberts. The crew of the
brigantine Hope brought home to envious tars of the Bos-
ton waterfront reports of the beauty of the Marquesan
women, launching a legend which has made more beach-
combers than any other one cause. Captain John Boit, Jr.,
nineteen-year-old master of the eighty-nine-ton sloop
Union, of Boston, who visited “Owhyhee” in 1795, \ras
obliged to record in his log that “the females were quite

92 JOHN JACOB AST OR

amorous.” And sailors made light of scurvy because an
outbreak of the disease compelled a skipper to halt at one
or other of the island groups, and ^ve his men a run
ashore. Sometimes the natives of the islands resented the
familiarities of the white visitors, and there’d be swift,
deadly brawls on the beach, rushes of outrigger canoes in
the darkness — and perhaps a “long pig” broiling on the
hot stones next day.

If a master successfully navigated the Pacific, dodging
the vmmarked shoals and reefs, weathering hurricanes
and hostile natives, he had still to traverse the seas beyond,
where typhoons and Malay proas took toll of the ven-
turesome, and ofF Macao, itself, with its festering life of
intrigue shut like a tumor within a belt of gray walls, he
might have to crack on all sail to avoid a fleet of pirate
junks, which would pursue him upriver to within range of
the Bogue forts. Canton, too, could be difficult for him.
He must rigidly observe the solemn ritual the officials pre-
scribed, compose himself to interminable delays and grin
cheerfully vmder continual blackmailing, see to it that
his crews obeyed the ridiculous “Eight Regulations” —
kept within the bounds of the factories when ashore, “ex-
cept on the eighth, eighteenth, and twenty-eighth days of
the moon” when they might “take the air in the com-
pany of z Linguist to visit the Flower Gardens and the
Honan joss-house, but not in droves of over ten at one
time” — and weren’t murdered or unduly robbed in the
gayly-painted singsong boats that battened on idle sailor-
men.

Finally, if the ship at last received her chests of Hyson
and Souchong, her bolts of heavy, raw silk, her crates of
china elaborately packed in aromatic ricepaper, there was
the long road home to consider: dangerous seas again as
far as Java Head, almost as dangerous seas beyond that
landfall, the whole vast sweep of the Indian Ocean to
compass — ^the tricky currents of the Agulhas Bank, the
baffling winds of the Cape of Good Hope, only less try-

FUR AND TEA 93

ing than the Horn; the torrid South Atlantic, the lonely
weeks of slanting northwest across empty wastes, where a
sail was to be fled lest it prove a British frigate short-
handed, with a press-gang ready to go overside; the dol-
drums of the line, the rasping snarl of gales keen-edged
off the Arctic ice. Many a homebound American beat for-
lornly back and forth for weeks almost within sight of
port, unable to make head against contrary winds. Some,
with rich cargoes, were wrecked under such circumstances,
having four times crossed the Equator and escaped scores
of perils in three toilsome, anxious years. But most got in,
and when they did the fort guns roared an answer to
their salutes, and crowds pelted to the wharves to gape at
salt-white bulwarks and torn sails, and the plunder of
gaudy tropic birds and feather cloaks and silken shawls
the survivors of the crew brandished at their friends. And
the owner, three years of worry peeling off his brow,
hustled down from his counting-room to shake the skip-
per’s hand, and over glasses of madeira con the manifest
to gauge the cargo’s worth at current market rates.

They earned their profits, those Northwesters.

It must be apparent that in the eyes of the Grand Hoppo
Jacob’s Permit No. 68 would have had distinctly less value
than a ticket in the Macao lottery. Indeed, any foreign
trader who came to Canton with the idea that the East
India Company’s approval was requisite to his success
would have incurred the bitter enmity of the Chinese, who
scorned the Fan-Kwae of every race and tolerated the
few they admitted merely for the value to China of the
oversea commerce involved. Livermore’s captain must
have kept very quiet about the permit in his talks with
the Hoppo, the Linguists, Pinqua or Houqua or whoever
of the thirteen Hong merchants acted for him. Otherwise
his vessel would have been confiscated, and he and his
men cast into prison or awarded the Thousand Cuts. The

94 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

Canton Prices Current was of more substantial use in esti-
mating the character of cargo required for the trade, and
the quantities of goods which might be procured in
exchange.

But I’m not prepared to junk the story as entirely false.
It was iterated and reiterated by Jacob and his children,
became a stock anecdote of New York business and con-
tinued as such for the next seventy-five years — or until
the rush of new events after the Civil War destroyed the
interest of Americans in their beginnings, an interest which
was not to be reawakened until the World War left us
with enormously increased responsibilities and a converse
tendency to search the past for lessons for future guid-
ance. A story that persisted so, that was so circumstantial,
must have had some germ of truth in it. John Jacob Astor
was neither so mendacious nor so imaginative — ^perish the
thought! — as to be capable of deliberately propagating
such a legend out of the imcut cloth. No, there must have
been. a Permit No. 68, and however spurious its forth-
right value it surely suggested to Livermore some profit-
able use.

Possibly he regarded it as a safeguard against the in-
numerable British cruisers, ready to seize American ves-
sels suspected of intending to trade with the enemy, while
a second consideration might have been a questionable
degree of protection from French men-o’-war, equally
determined to check American commerce with Britain. The
Permit, bearing the seal of the East India Company, the
instrument which had crushed France’s ambitions in Ben-
gal and the Carnatic, conceivably might irritate any
Frenchman, yet, together with the ship’s papers, it guaran-
teed her ultimate destination. There could be no harm to
France in a voyage from New York to Canton, despite
incidental stops at British East Indian ports. Indeed, it
was to France’s interest to strengthen America’s com-
mercial competition with the British in the Far East. But
nevertheless, and whatever modicum of truth there may be

FUR AND TEA 95

in these suppositions, Livermore paid an outrageous price
for the document, one out of ail proportion to its worth —
a tribute to Jacob’s salesmanship.

The immediate consequence of the episode was Jacob’s
determination to enter the Canton trade upon his own
account. With the fifty-five thousand dollars Livermore
paid him he purchased a ship — ^at this time stout, handy
vessels of two hundred and fifty tons cost about seven
thousand dollars — and loaded it with an assorted cargo
such as Livermore had chosen, including a substantial sum
in silver dollars. But in the meantime he had learned
something of the Canton trade, and instead of sending
his ship out by way of the Cape of Good Hope, he es-
chewed the dubious advantages of Permit No. 68, and
instructed his captain to follow the route of the Boston
Northwesters around the Horn. He wasn’t as yet, how-
ever, thinking of the new trade in terms of fur. His ship
was not to visit the foggy inlets of the northwest coast,
but to strike off across the Pacific by way of the Sand-
wich Islands stopping there for a deckload of sandal-
wood, always in demand in China.

The gossipy gentleman, who, imder the pseudonym of
Walter Barrett, wrote that most amusing and delightful
book, “The Old Merchants of New York,” a compendium
of information and misinformation, invariably entertain-
ing, on the leaders of the city’s business life during the
years between the Revolution and the Civil War, would
have us believe that Jacob’s captain and supercargo were
ignorant of the value of sandalwood, actually didn’t recog-
nize its smell when they handled it, for, says he:

. . she touched at the Sandwich Islands to take in
water and fresh provisions. They also laid in a large stock
of firewood. When the ship reached Canton a mandarin
came on board, and noticing their firewood, asked the price
of it at once. The Captain laughed at such a question, but
signified that he was open to an offer. The mandarin
offered five himdred dollars a ton, and every part of it

96 JOHN JACOB AST OR

was sold at that price. That was sandah^oodi.. For seven-
teen years Mr. Astor enjoyed that lucrative sandalwood
trade without a rival. No other concern in the United
States or England knew the secret. Nor was it discovered
until a shrewd Boston shipowner detailed a ship to follow
Mr. Astor’s, and observe the events of the voyage. Then,
for some time, that house was a participant in this valua-
ble trade.”

Very interesting, but the fact remains that sandalwood
was discovered on ‘^Owhyhee” by Captain Kendrick on
one of his voyages from Nootka Sound to Canton in the
Lady W ashmgtony prior to 1794. He happened to know
its value in Chinese eyes, and the fragrant commodity
subsequendy became a part of every Northwester’s trans-
pacific cargo. Sandalwood was an old story to the Boston
skippers years before Jacob’s first independent Canton
venture 5 by 1805, they were landing 1,600 piculs an-
nually at the Whampoa godowns. There can not be the
slightest doubt that Jacob learned it was obtainable in the
Sandwich group either from some Bostonian or the public
prints, which frequendy mentioned its prominence in the
Canton trade.

Worthy Mr. “Barrett” was likewise responsible for the
dissemination, if not the propagation, of the yarn de-
scribing the miraculous qualities adhering to Permit No.
68. He tells it more circumstantially than any other early
biographer, with so much vivid detail, in fact, that, as I
have said before, he contrives to invest it with an atmos-
phere of verisimilitude, even for one who knows how pre-
posterous is his general thesis. But it is only fair to add
that he possessed a wide acquaintance with many of the
merchants of the thirty years or so immediately preced-
ing the Civil War, men who were contemporaries and
business associates of Astor. The yarns he repeats are not
original with himself, but fragments of the myth which
human nature insisted upon creating out of the truths
and half-truths known about a figure as remarkable to the

FUR AND TEA 97

mercantile society of the period as any Napoleon or Lin-
coln. Long before Jacob died he was a legend rather than
a human figure: “Astor,” ‘‘Old Astor,” “Old Hunks,”
“The Old Skinflint,” “Miser Aston,” and, apotheosis of
all, “richest man in the country.”

His second Canton venture was as successful as the first,
and the profits went to him alone. One ship ceased to
suffice his needs. He bought more. By 1803, he was build-
ing his own vessels. In this year his famous ship Beatvery
of four hundred and twenty-seven tons burthen, was
launched from Henry Eckford’s shipyard at the foot of
Clinton Street on the East River. Presently, to quote his
own expression, “he had a million dollars afloat, which
represented a dozen vessels” — ^and their cargoes, of coimse.
His name, hitherto known only in New York and the out-
posts of the frontier which were centers for the fur trade,
began to be heard all up and down the Adantic seaboard
and in many an outlandish port of the Orient. In Bristol
and London his house-flag was a familiar sight amongst
the assembled shipping.

He was a great man, familiar with the aristocrats of
merchantry — ^John G. Coster, his neighbor on Broadway j
Francis Depau, who had married Sylvie, daughter of the
French Admiral de Grasse, who out-generaled the British
fleet off the Capes of the Chesapeake and enabled Wash-
ington to take Yorktownj Comfort Sands, whose daughter
had married Nat Prime, the money-lender, once the
plague of Jacob’s life 5 John Hone and his brother Philip,
the diarist and future Mayor j William Walton, whose
great, yellow, brick house at 326 Queen (Pearl) Street
was one of the show-places of the city, and Gerard, his
brother, a retired Admiral of the British Navy — ex-Tories,
this pair, among the few who had dared to remain after the
British evacuation, pillars of the St. George’s Society, but
respected for their lineage and financial integrity} rugged,
old Marinus Willett, hero of the Revolution} David
Lydig, the flour factor, who had risen along with Jacob

98 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

since he opened shop at 2i Peck Slip in 179O} Stephen
Jumel, the dapper and kindly French wine-merchant, of
39 Stone Street; Jacob Barker, the energetic banker, finan-
cial dictator of the generation ; Archibald Grade, who was
already hewing out a second fortune after losing one
through seizure of his ships by the French.

When Jacob entered the Tontine Coffee House, in Wall
Street, where the Merchant’s Exchange — ^precursor of the
Stock Exchange — ^met, men hurried to speak with him,
indicated him to out-of-town correspondents, invited in
for a chunk of raw codfish and a glass of spirits at “noon-
ing” that they might be able to report to their dazzled
friends in the backwoods on the notable persons of the
day. And when he passed Mrs. Keese’s boarding-house on
the northeast corner of Broadway and Wall Street, across
from Trinity Yard, where the politicians and lawyers con-
gregated, he’d be tackled by such distinguished gentry as
William P. Van Ness, Thomas J. Oakly, DeWitt Clinton,
John Armstrong, Chancellor Livingston, Solomon Van
Rensselaer, the Patroon, down from his manorial estate
for a visit; Barent Gardinier and Aaron Burr — ^before the
exile. They were always friends, Astor and Burr. The
little, wispy, dapper gentleman, who ruined a promising
career by an accurate pistol-shot on Weehawken Heights,
had descried valuable possibilities in the stolid, chunky,
young German at a time when the distance separating
their stations might well have seemed an unbridgeable
void to Jacob. Tea changed all that. Tea and fur.

If Jacob was ignorant of the demand for furs in China
when he entered the Canton trade, he wasn’t slow to
learn from the experiences of the Northwesters who had
preceded him; and as matters developed in the early years
of the new century he was soon able to outpoint the Bos-
tonians at their own game. Where they were obliged to
secure all their furs on the Northwest coast, his chain

FUR AND TEA 99

of trading-posts along the shores of the Great Lakes and
the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi valleys, provided a
constantly increasing harvest of peltry. And the Louisiana
Purchase, in 1803, ultimately extended the bounds of his
empire to the Rocky Mountains. He had competitors in
this field, but none who could meet him on an equal
footing. And when he decided to take another leaf from
the book of the Northwesters, and dispatch an annual
vessel to the waters north of Puget Sound, it was simply
because the yield of his trading-posts was no longer suffi-
cient to meet the requirements of domestic consumption,
the European market, and China. The American beaver
couldn’t breed fast enough to supply top-hats for the
Occident and fur-pelisses for the Orient.

The Northwesters continued their trade, undaunted by
his competition — rafter a temporary stoppage during the
War of 1812, they struggled on until 1837 — ^^ut they
could never hope to rival the efficiency and multiplicity
of Astor’s eflForts. Where they must follow one set for-
mula, and be entirely dependent upon the diligence and
friendship of an unusually lazy and treacherous race of
savages, in order to procure the necessary cargo for a Can-
ton voyage, Jacob could operate on one of several lines.
He might, if it suited him, employ their formula, dispatch
a ship from New York, with a cargo of trade-goods —
pocket-mirrors, shoes, duffle coats and trousers, chisels,
knives, buttons, gimlets, needles, nails, flints, steels, mus-
kets, etc. — around the Horn to Vancouver, exchange this
cargo for furs, sail for the Sandwich Islands, trading
there for sancMwood and pearls, and so on to Canton,
where tea, matting, willow ware, cinnamon, silks, and
nankeens replaced the pelts and sandalwood. Or he might
ship a cargo of furs to England or the Continent, ex-
changing it for goods adaptable to the Canton market,
which the vessel would then convey to the Far East
around the Cape of Good Hope. Or he might ship a cargo

100 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

of furs provided by his trading posts direct from New
York for Canton.

The scale upon which he worked, and the extraordinary
success he attained, combined to provide him resources
surpassing those of all competitors. He could buy trade-
goods cheaper, procure furs cheaper and in greater va-
riety and if one of his markets suffered a slump for local
reasons divert his energies from it temporarily without
undue dislocation of his efforts. He might even refuse to
send furs to Canton at a pinch, disposing of them else-
where and turning their value into the heavy Spanish
silver dollars which the Chinese would accept failing a
barter in kind. Tea, to be sure, he must have. Tea was one
of the two foundation stones of his rapidly expanding
business. Fur the other. The cardinal principle of his busi-
ness was that fur must be sent out of the United States,
and tea fetched in. If he kept these two commodities
flying back and forth across the world, he couldn’t very
well lose. For a time, perhaps j but in a limited sense, and
not nearly so much as other merchants, who were neither
so securely entrenched nor so widely spread in their
undertakings.

Forty-odd years later, Philip Hone, whose firm were
auctioneers, licensed by the State under existing law,
wrote in his diary:

“The fur trade was the philosopher’s stone of this
modern Croesus, beaver skins and muskrats furnishing
the oil for the supply of Aladdin’s lamp. His traffic was
the shipment of furs to China, where they brought im-
mense prices, for he monopolized the business} and the
return cargoes of teas, silks, and rich productions of China
brought further large profits} for here, too, he had very
little competition at the time of which I am speaking.
My brother and I found Mr. Astor a valuable customer.
We sold many of his cargoes and had no reason to com-
plain of a want of liberality or confidence. All he touched

lor

FUR AND TEA

turned to gold, and it seemed as if fortime delighted in
erecting him a monument of her unerring potency.”

That final sentence might well serve as epitaph for
Jacob’s eventful career, but Hone trembles on the verge
of exaggeration. Jacob never monopolized the tea trade,
and his monoply of the domestic fur trade was severely
contested almost to the end of his reign over the raw
regions of the West. Nor was he content to rely absolutely
upon the fur trade for the overseas commerce which re-
quired a fleet of a dozen ships. He sent his captains wher-
ever opportunity of profit was promised, and he dealt
in any and all goods for which he perceived a market- A
good man to deal with — ^in a stricdy business way — his
fellows said. He named a price for goods — and stuck
to it. And he never misrepresented what he had for sale.
In other ways he could be as shifty as an eel, but concrete
things — what you could put your hands on — ^he sold with
scrupulous honesty.

John Robins, who was almost as famous a drygoods
merchant as Astor was a fur trader, handed down an anec-
dote which illustrates this facet of his character. During
the War of 1812, there were intermittent shortages of
goods, due to the British blockade, and far-seeing mer-
chants were always trying to corner the available supply
of any specific article. Robins had once purchased all the
long nankeens on the open market from the Hones’ auc-
tioneering firm. Only one other supply existed, and Astor
owned that. So Robins hustled around from his store in
Pearl Street to Astor’s, which was then at 69 Pine Street.

“Hear you have some long nankeens, Jacob,” he said.
«Ja.”

“How many you got?”

Jacob told him.

“I’d like to see ’em.”

“Ja.”

And Jacob went to one of the shelves, lifted down a
bolt and carried it to the long counter which ran down

102 JOHN JACOB AST OR

the center of the store. Here he dusted off a space, slowly
and methodically, and spread the goods for Robins^
inspection.

“What’s your price?” asked the drygoods man.

Jacob named it. He knew, as everyone downtown knew,
that Robins had cleaned out the only other lot that morn-
ing j but instead of quoting an extreme price, in an attempt
to exploit his customer’s situation, he named one very
slightly above the figiure the Hones’ lot had brought
at auction.

“I’ll take ’em, Jacob,” Robins answered promptly, not
really surprised, for he was used to dealing with Astor.

“Have dem today. Chon?” Jacob inquired, methodi-
cally folding up the bolt he had displayed.

“Yes, send them up to 450 Pearl.”

A half-century afterward Robins, still hale and hearty,
brushing off the walk in front of his store every morning
and paying the highest property tax of any citizen, in-
cluding William B. Astor and A. T. Stewart, liked to
retell this story to the young merchants, who wouldn’t
think of demeaning themselves by taking a broom or a
bolt of goods in their own hands.

“That was Jacob Astor,” he’d say. “An easy man to
get on with. He said what he meant, and he meant what
he said. He had one price, it was a fair one, gauged on
the market, and you could take it or leave it. He wouldn’t
haggle with you.”

As often as not, Robins or whoever happened in would
find Sarah in the store, especially if there was a ship load-
ing for China. It wasn’t necessary these days for her to
help in beating and packing the pelts, but Jacob had the
highest respect for her judgement of furs, and he
wouldn’t have dreamed of dispatching a cargo of which
she hadn’t given definite approval. He paid her hand-
somely for her work, too.

“Veil, Sarah,” he’d say at early breakfast over his
steaming cup of Mocha — which Captain Joseph Ropes of

FUR AND TEA 103

the Salem ship Recovery y had introduced to the country
in 1798, “ve going to load dot Beaver. You vant to look
at dem pelts from der Lakes? Der musquash, dey ain’t
so goodt.”

“I’m a busy woman, Jacob,” Sarah would snap back,
twinkling. “This is a big house, and the girls — ”

“It don’t take long,” he’d wheedle. “Undt I pay
you. Ja!”

“How long?”

“Maybe vun hour, maybe two.” His twinkle would
match hers. “Nobody like you to chudge furs, Sarah.
Come! I pay you.”

“You’ll have to pay well to get me away from this
housework,” she’d chuckle.

“How much you vant?”

“Five hundred dollars an hour, my man.”

“You got it. I tell der poys to spreadt out dem packs
for you. Ten o’clock, ja?”

One circumstance, which facilitated Jacob’s Canton
trade, as it did the ventures of all the merchants trading
to the Far East, was the Federal Government’s practice
of extending credit to importers for the duties owed for
periods of nine, twelve, and eighteen months. Of course,
all importers were allowed this facility, but it was espe-
cially valuable to the tea-merchants because of the length
of the voyage involved and the tremendous tariffs on
teas, which were usually in excess of one hundred per
cent and occasionally as high as one hundred and seventy
per cent. Instead of being saddled with the payment of
these sums immediately after entering his manifest, Jacob
would be extended credit for them by a paternal govern-
ment— ^which, of course, had taken his bond, in the mean-
time— ^with the effect of a proportionate increase in his
liquid capital.

In other words, he was able to operate to a considerable
extent on government capital, amounting to hundreds of
thousands of dollars a year, sufficient to finance several

JOHN JACOB AST OR

104

additional voyages for each one concluded, according to
an authority previously quoted^:

“A house that could raise money enough to send
$200,000 ^ in specie could soon have an uncommon capi-
tal, and this was the working of the old system:

“The Griswolds owned the ship Panama, They started
her from New York in the month of May, with a cargo
of perhaps $30,000 worth of ginseng, spelter, lead, iron,
etc., and $170,000 in Spanish dollars. The ship goes on
the voyage, and reaches Whampoa in safety. Her super-
cargo in two months has her loaded with tea, some china-
ware, a great deal of cassia, or false cinnamon, and a few
other articles. Suppose the cargo is mainly tea, costing
about thirty-seven cents per pound on the average.

“The duty was enormous in those days. It was twice
the cost of the tea at least} so that a tea cargo of $200,000,
when it had paid duty of seventy-five cents a pound,
which would be $400,000, amounted to $600,000. The
profit was at least fifty per cent on the original cost, or
$100,000, which would make the cargo worth $700,000.

“The cargo would be sold almost on arrival (say eleven
or twelve months after the ship left New York in May),
to wholesale grocers for their notes at four and six
months, say $700,000.

“In those years there was credit given by the United
States of nine, twelve, and eighteen months! So that the
East India or Canton merchant, after his ship had made
one voyage, had the use of Government capital to the
extent of $400,000 on the ordinary cargo of a China ship.

“No sooner had the ship Panama arrived, or any of
the regular East Indiamen, than the cargo would be ex-
changed for grocers’ notes, for $700,000. These notes
would be turned into specie very easily, and the owner

^ “The Old Merchants of New York,” by Walter Barrett.

* Barrett was writing of the period about 1830, after Astor’s retire-
ment from the trade and when the values represented in it had increased
materially 5 but the essential elements of it, as he indicates, remained the
same.

FUR AND TEA 105

had only to pay his bonds for $400,000 duty, at nine,
twelve, or eighteen months, giving him time actually to
send two more ships with $200,000 each in them to Can-
ton, and have them back again in New York before the
bonds on the first voyage were due.

“John Jacob Astor, at one period of his life, had sev-
eral ships operating in this way. They would go to Oregon
on the Pacific, and carry from thence furs to Canton.
These would be sold at large profits. Then the cargoes
of tea for New York would pay enormous duties, which
Astor did not have to pay to the United States for a
year and a half. His tea cargoes would be sold for good
four and six months’ paper or perhaps cash 5 so that for
eighteen or twenty years John Jacob Astor had what was
actually a free-of-interest loan from the Government of
the United States of over $5,000,000. Astor was prudent
and lucky in his operations, and such an enormous gov-
ernment loan didn’t ruin him, as it did others.”

In his rambling, repetitious way, old “Walter Barrett”
presents the working of the system very intelligibly, but
as usual he requires checking up. While it is true that
outbound cargoes for Canton did run as high as $250,000,
such an investment was very much the exception rather
than the rule, and in the heyday of the trade, when Astor
participated in it, $200,000 cargoes were unheard of. We
are told that he regarded $30,000 as a fair profit on a
China voyage, and, as “Barrett” says, fifty per cent was
a fair rate of return, which would indicate an initial in-
vestment of $60,000. But on the other hand, Astor’s
ventures increased substantially after the War of 1812,
in keeping with the expansion of his fur interest, and what
would have been considered by him a good return in the
first decade of the century must have seemed trivial
by 1820.

Again, “Barrett” is manifestly in error when he speaks
of the postponement of payment of the duties as “a free-
of-interest loan from the Government.” Technically, it

io6 JOHN JACOB AST OR

was} but the importer, of course, had to put up a bond,
on which he must pay interest to the bondsman. Yet there
is no dodging the main point involved. In effect, the Gov-
ernment allowed importers the use of large blocks of
credit at a rate of interest ridiculously low in that day of
three and four per cent a month paper. Any importer
who didn’t jump at the chance of utilizing the time placed
at his disposal was a fool. He could very well afford to
pay a bondsman for eighteen months’ coverage, even for
twelve months. If he didn’t care to employ the capital
so released to him in another China venture, there were
plenty of opportunities closer to home. He might turn a
pretty penny by doing no more than loaning out the
Government’s credit at three per cent a month to needier
small merchants and tradesmen.

The temptations inherent in the system were irresist-
ible alike to fools and knaves, and as was to be expected,
it was abominably abused. Between the years 1789, the
birth-year of the Republic, and 1823, the Government
lost $250,000,000 in import duties, payment of which
had been postponed, and it is significant that none of the
defaulters were prosecuted — ^for the simple reason that
they were bankrupt. Bonds had been posted, to be surej
but bonds in that age of innocence were worth the finan-
cial capacity of an individual, and no more.

But there is another side to the picture. The country
was woefully short of cash in its infancy. There wasn’t
in existence, and shouldn’t be for several generations, a
banking structure worthy of the name, as we comprehend
banking today; and American merchants, laboring under
this handicap, must withstand the competition of for-
eigners who were possessed of infinitely greater credit
facilities. Congress had realized this difficulty, and pro-
vided for easy terms of payment of import duties to help
native shippers and merchants. And the system did help
honest, intelligent merchants, allowing men in Boston
and New York to compete on something approaching

FUR AND TEA 107

even terms with houses in London that were financed by
the Bank of England and Baring Brothers and the
Rothschilds.

More, it directly aided the Canton trade because the
necessity of shipping large amounts of silver to this mar-
ket aggravated the perennial specie shortage still further
— so much so that the recurrent financial depressions were
blamed partially upon the continual withdrawals of coined
silver for export to Canton. It will be remembered that
it was to meet this problem that the original Boston syn-
dicate of Northwesters dispatched the Columbia and the
Eady Washington to Vancouver, with the idea that furs
should take the place of silver. Alas, there weren’t enough
furs on the continent of North America, apparently, to
trade for the tea the country’s gullets craved. Silver
continued to be a staple of export, and so late as 1819
the panic of that year, the most disastrous the country
had yet suffered, was ascribed in the report of a special
committee of the New York State Senate to the remorse-
less drainage of milled dollars into the lazarets of the
tea-ships — “the result,” remarked the Committee, “has
been the banishment of metallic currency, the loss of
commercial confidence, fictitious capital, increase of civil
prosecutions, and multiplication of crimes.”

At this time the banks of New York had in circulation
$12,500,000 of paper notes, bottomed on reserves of
$2,000,000 in specie, a sum which was insufficient to main-
tain the notes at anything like their face value. Indeed,
in times of stringency paper money became quite worth-
less, and the banks calmly shut their doors, appealed to
the State for military protection and left their depositors
to misery, bankruptcy, or suicide.

On the whole, it is difficult to say whether the deferred
payment of duties was a curse or a help to prosperity. It
certainly stimulated overseas trade j but equally certainly,
it deprived the Government of more than $250,000,000
in revenues. It helped to make possible the shipping of

io8 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

coined ^Iver to Canton to buy tea and other Chinese
products when American merchants had no barter in kind
to oflFer; but this was at the cost of distortion of the coun-
try’s rickety financial structure. Perhaps it deserves to be
judged in the light of an assertion of grim Nat Griswold,
of the great firm of N. L. & G. Griswold, one of Jacob’s
contemporaries — ^‘‘Three merchants out of every hundred
succeed. The rest go bankrupt or quit.” Success is for the
few, and if the deferred-duty system did nothing else,
it helped John Jacob Astor to amass the money he needed
to enlarge his fur business. Yet it is to be observed that
he finally retired from the Canton trade because of a
condition in the tea market directly attributable to abuse
of the Government’s credit by another merchant.

New York, like every other shipping town on the Atlan-
tic seaboard, was animated by a spirit such as pulsed
through the narrow lanes of Elizabethan London, In a
fine, rich glow of initiative, her merchants — ^merchant ad-
venturers, in very truth — ^were speeding their ships to the
uttermost corners of the seas. The harbor was choked with
craft. Wharves thrust their stubby fingers into the chan-
nel from every street end, and foot by foot, the shoreline
of Manhattan was trenching upon the swirling currents
of East and North Rivers. Front Street, which faced the
forested slopes of Brooklyn, should soon lose the point of
its name, and Water Street appear where once tall ships
had lain} but not for many and many a year would the
growing wall of warehouses be pushed into midstream to
form South Street. Along the North River front, too, the
dumpers were tirelessly busy} houses on the westward side
of Greenwich Street need no longer be erected on piles}
gardens extended farther and farther beyond them. Pres-
ently, Washington Street should rise from the mud, and
after that. West.

The East River front rang to the clinking of hammers

FUR AND TEA 109

and battering of calkers’ mauls in the row of shipyards,
which gave ofiF a pleasant, clean smell of seasoned pine
and cypress and the salty aroma of oak beams soaked in
water to toughen them. Block after block, the ways
stretched northwards, beginning with Forman Cheesman’s
at Corlears Hook, where the President frigate was built in
1800; next, Vail & Vincent’s, builders of the Oliver Ells-
worth packet, which made the voyage from New York
to Liverpool in fourteen days; Sam Ackley’s, foot of
Pelham Street, where the Manhattan East Indiaman, a
leviathan of six hundred tons, was created; Henry Eck-
ford’s, Christian Bergh’s — ^noted for the speed of his
craft, this cantankerous Dutchman; Adam and Noah
Brown’s, John Floyd’s. Not even the depredations of
Frenchman and Britisher, Barbary corsair and Malay
pirate, could check the labors of these yards. The Em-
bargo of 1807, which forbade American ships to clear
for foreign ports — a reprisal against France and Britain,
which, the Federalists said, was a case of cutting off your
own nose to spite your face — ^was a hindrance, and it
slowed up trade, ruined many; but New York didn’t
feel the ill-effects so drastically as New England. The
tonnage of shipping owned in the port increased from
217,381 in 1807 to 268,548 In 1810.

In common with other unpopular laws, the Embargo
Act was a source of considerable lawlessness. Your true-
blue American was as disdainful of a law which incom-
moded him in 1807 as he is in 1928. The mercantile
interests of the seaboard towns snarled that they were
the victims of the agricultural South and the radical new
frontier states, jealous of the indubitable wealth which
overseas trade was pouring into the tills of New York,
Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Salem, Portsmouth, and
a dozen places now dozing in a haze of half-forgotten
memories of their mighty past. The South and the fron-
tier rapped back that the shipping centers were unpatriotic,
lacking in national pride, and what was most heinous,

no JOHN JACOB AST OR

battening selfishly on the needs of the rest of the country.
A breach was made, which was to be the source of un-
paralleled disaster during the approaching War. For the
first time the menace of sectionalism appeared. Hatred
was stirred. Men openly advocated defiance of a law they
held to be unfair — even so essentially conservative a per-
son as John Jacob Astor flouted it, if the evidence at hand
means what it seems to.

During the summer of i8o8, when the Embargo was
being most rigidly enforced, and the naval patrols refused
to permit vessels to pass Sandy Hook, imless they were
certified in the coasting trade and had given bond not to
touch at any foreign . port, it became noised about in
Broadway and Wall and Pearl Streets that Astor’s ship
Beaver was loading for a China voyage. Other merchants
listened to the reports with incredulity. Inquiries were
launched, which produced nothing. Astor was uncommuni-
cative 5 he could be very silent in a stolid, German fashion.
“Der Beaver vass being overhauled, ja.” For the rest, he
shrugged his shoulders. And honest men said it wasn’t
any of their business, and dishonest men wondered what
trick the Dutchman had in mind to smuggle past the
patrols a four-hundred-ton East Indiaman. A fake voyage
to New Orleans, say? Not likely! Chance a dash out
through the Sound? Tight quarters for a big ship, with
a frigate on her heels, unless the wind was just right.

Then on August 13, in the shipping column of the
New York Commercial Advertiser ^ appeared this one-line
notice:

“Yesterday the ship Beaver j Captain Galloway, sailed
for China.”

There was a roar of indignation. Stout gentlemen
choked over their raw codfish at nooning in the Tontine,
and must gulp down an extra glass of spirits lest they
choke — on rage rather than codfish. “Why should one
merchant be favored?” “Damme, sir, I hold nothing

Ill

FUR AND TEA

against Astor, but “ ’Tis favoritism. Favoritism, I

say, sir. Rank favoritism.” And so on.

They bombarded the local representatives of the Fed-
eral Government, who were distinctly uncomfortable. It
appeared that Mr. Astor had obtained special permission
for this voyage, so that he might send home to Canton
a great Chinese mandarin, who had been visiting our
shores, in striking contrast to the traditionally exclusive
attitude of his class. A great Chinese mandarin! Other
tea-merchants pricked up their ears. There was a hasty
canvassing of ship captains and supercargoes. Had anyone
heard of a mandarin taking passage from Canton? Not
for New York? Well, perhaps for Boston? Salem? But
nobody had, and gradually suspicion ripened into convic-
tion. There wasn’t any mandarin. But there was, insisted
the flustered Government ofiBcials. They had seen him in
his silken coat and peacock button, drinking tea in the
BeaveFs cabin. Whereupon the other tea-merchants
laughed or choked again, according to their several dis-
positions. One of the latter variety, unable to control his
wrath, wrote to the President, denouncing the hoax — ^‘‘the
great Chinese personage was no mandarin, not even a
Hong Kong merchant, but a common Chinese dock loafer,
smuggled out from China, who had departed from that
country contrary to its laws, and wo;ild be saved from
death on his return only by his obscure condition.”

The President ignored the letter — ^very wisely} but the
Commercial Advertiser attacked him editorially, and for
the first time during the controversy with Jacob was
drawn. A full statement of the facts should be conveyed
to the editor, wrote Jacob, if the editor was unprejudiced
and not influenced by envy in formulating his opinions.
With the facts in his (the editor’s) possession “he shall
be convinced that the Government has not been surprised
by misrepresentation in granting permission, and the repu-
tation of those concerned cannot be in the slightest degree
affected.”

1 12 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

Rather incoherent and scarcely ingenuous. How • was
the editor to prove himself imprejudiced? And in whose
eyes? Jacob’s? His own? Must both be at one in the
matter? It couldn’t be done! So, with a deal of table-
banging and corner-gossip and ferocious editorializing,
the tempest blew itself out. Jacob should worry. The
Beaver was safe at sea, with practically no rival ships to
compete with her for the market, and by the time she
dropped anchor oflF Governors Island again the country
would be as thirsty for tea as it had been immediately
after the conclusion of the Revolution. Justifiable opti-
mism, too. When the Beaver returned in the Fall of 1809,
the gossip of the Tontine common-room was that her
owner cleared a profit of $200,000 on her cargo. Fifteen
months of the Embargo had thrown the entire commer-
cial framework out of kilter 5 grocers were clamoring for
tea, and Souchong fetched the price once asket^ for Im-
perial gunpowder.

It was Jacob’s biggest coup, most noteworthy, however,
not for the addition to his swelling account in Jacob
Barker’s Bank, but as the first occasion of his brushing the
law from his path. And it isn’t to be wondered at that
the law never afterward seemed so forbidding or majestic
to him. Why should he allow it to hinder him, who had
successfully tricked or bull-dozed or bought the President
of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, himself, author
of the Declaration of Independence; the Federal District
Attorney, the Revenue officers, and the Naval authorities?
The law was for ordinary men, not for those who looked
ahead and struggled against stupidity and official lassitude
to build an empire on a base of fur and tea.

It was typical of Jacob that he was perhaps the one man
in New York to profit from the Embargo. For the coun-
try at large, regarded solely as an economic experiment, it
was a tragic misfortune. It crippled the new-founded
overseas commerce, and must have wrecked our shipping,
except for the extraordinary vitality of the sealward

FUR AND TEA 113

towns and the favorable situation provided by European
politics. The merchant marine in the foreign trade, about
900,000 tons in 1807, was earning an average of fifty
dollars per ton per year, or $45,000,000, it has been
estimated, and the fleet which produced this princely
revenue cost around twenty-five or thirty dollars per
ton to build. That is, the country’s overseas fleet was
earning nearly twice its capital value when Jefferson
decided to subordinate economics to politics, with the
consequences inevitably attached to so crass a perversion
of statesmanship.

What did more than anything else to save the financial
skins of the merchants who managed to survive the
arbitrary curtailment of trade was the determination of
the British to press their campaign against Napoleon in
Portugal and Spain. For the ensuing three years, or until
we, ourselves, declared war upon Britain, the United
States practically supplied Wellington’s armyj and this
comparatively short-haul trafSic provided the means for
resumption of the East Indian, Baltic, Caribbean, and
South American trades. But John Jacob Astor, thanks to
that one unscrupulous Canton voyage, with “a great
Chinese personage” in the Seaver*s cabin, had no occasion
to fret himself over insurance rates to Lisbon against
seizure by French privateers. He placidly continued trad-
ing fur for tea, and tea, in one shape or another, for fur.

He was, by now, the first merchant of New York.

VII

The War of 1812 was more disastrous to American
commerce even than had been Jefferson’s Embargo Act.
The glorious roll of naval victories and the ravages of
our privateers couldn’t offset the practical stoppage of the
overseas trade. It is true that the 517 privateers and
letters-of-marque we sent to sea captured 1,345 prizes,
augmented by 254 taken by the vessels of the Navy, with
a total value of $45,600,000} but our merchant marine

1 14 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

had been earning in excess of this sxxm annually before
hostilities, and it must be remembered that the depreda-
tions of British cruisers were almost as severe/ Our har-
bors were jammed with useless shipping, their topmasts
housed, tar-barrels called “Madison’s night-caps” cover-
ing their mastheads as a protection against the rotting
drip of moisture.

For two and a half years American vessels — ^that is,
as purely merchant craft — hardly showed themselves off-
shore. The few that cleared were heavily armed as
letters-of-marque, carrying expensive crews to protect
their cargoes and seize upon whatever opportunities
occurred to make prizes of weaker Englishmen. Jacob
refused to commit capital to so chancy an undertaking as
privateering, so none of his ships is to be found in the
roster of fifty-five privateers outfitted from New York}
but his business requirements obliged him several times
to make use of letters-of-marque. In March, 1813, he
dispatched the Lark, with provisions and supplies for his
post at Astoria, in Oregon — ^the story of this, the most
pretentious of his enterprises, will be told elsewhere —
and she succeeded in running the blockade j but was
wrecked in a gale off the Sandwich Islands, and so far
as I can learn, took no prizes.

About the same time two of his tea ships succeeded in
evading the British patrols in the Pacific, the Indian and
Atlantic Oceans, and landed bumper cargoes on the Astor
dock in Greenwich Street, between Liberty and Court-
landt Streets, over against the brick warehouse he had
purchased some years since to care for his East Indian
trade. As during the Embargo, he turned a tidy profit
on these voyages, thanks to the curtailment of tea im-
ports} but they couldn’t compensate him for the loss of
Astoria and the wrecking of his fur trade by the ebb and

^ James, the British naval historian, claims the capture of 2,000 sail.
Cog-g-eshall, the American, concedes 500. The true estimate would be be-
tween those totals, I imagine.

FUR AND TEA 115

sway of the fighting on the Western frontier, where
the red men plied tomahawk and scalping-knife in a last
desperate struggle to stem the tide of white emigration
which was forcing them out of their hunting grounds
this side of the Mississippi. Nor was a cargo of tea so
valuable, despite the restricted supply, when insurance
rates from Canton were seventy-five per cent and upwards
on ships built before the war, and fifty per cent on the
new clippers, with sharp hulls and raking spars, designed
for speed rather than stowage. Very soon, too, there ceased
to be any reason for marine insurance, for in December,
1813, Congress laid a second Embargo, not only upon
overseas but coastwise shipping. “Madison’s night-caps”
became the costume de rigeur for everything that floated.

But Jacob was undismayed. Temporarily, fur and tea
had failed him. He developed other sources of income.
Possessed of ample liquid capital, he proceeded with the
cool detachment that was his dominant business trait, to
exploit the troubles of less fortunate merchants and
investors. Men whose ships were taken by the enemy or
whose livelihoods were affected by the stagnation of trade
were forced to borrow money on notes or mortgages.
Jacob had scant use for notes, but a mortgage to him
was a sound investment, and he had no scruples about
foreclosing one. During the War and subsequent years
he acquired several of the most valuable parcels of real
estate, which ultimately formed the bulk of the Astor
fortune. He bought land cheap, too. And he wasn’t
above making money out of the Government’s difficul-
ties. In December, l8ia. Congress authorized a loan of
$16,000,000 to finance extraordinary military expendi-
tures, and of this total $10,000,000 was taken by Jacob,
David Paris, and Stephen Girard, of Philadelphia, for
themselves and their friends. They bought the bonds at
80 j a year after peace was declared the issue commanded
120. In the meantime, while the price was low, Jacob
bought all he could carry from the Doubting Thomases,

ii6 'JOHN JACOB AST OR

who foresaw bankruptcy for the United States, He could
well afford the loss of $800,000 in his Astoria venture.

He had his finger in many financial pies during these
troubled years, taking advantage of abnormal conditions
to corner the available supply of staple goods, buying
shares of stocks from embarrassed friends, financing over-
land freight ventures to replace the coastwise traffic —
dubbed by Federalist newspapers the “horse marine” — and
contractors who worked on the fortifications. Like the
Rothschilds, he had a keen perception of the value of
news in high finance, and throughout the war was served
by an elaWate underground organization, which kept
him informed regarding the inner secrets of Congress and
the Cabinet, as well as the developments in the enemy’s
camp. Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury, another
emigrant lad, was his personal friend, leaned on him for
advice — ^and repaid obligations in the coin of confidence.
His affiliations with Canada enabled him to maintain con-
tact with Montreal, despite the hostile armies cumbering
the Niagara frontier. Forest runners, who were his men,
rather than King George’s or the President’s, slipped
back and forth almost at will, and Jacob knew weekly
what reinforcements had reached Halifax, the trend of
Napoleon’s declining fortunes, the number of King’s ships
on the coast, the latest gossip of Westminster and the
Royal Exchange.

When the Peace Commissioners met at Ghent, he ar-
ranged for a series of relays from Montreal to New
York, by means of which he received word of the signa-
ture of the treaty on December 30, 1814, two days in
advance of the Government, to which he communicated
his intelligence with naive satisfaction — ^but not until
after he had unloaded his stocks of foreign goods on
hand at the current local prices. His brig Seneca^ com-
manded by Captain Augustus DePeyster — ^who, in 1837,
skippered the Black Ball packet Columbus in a race
against the Sheridan^ Russell, master, of Collins’ Dramatic

FUR AND TEA 117

Line, from New York to Liverpool, $10,000 a side, which
the Columbus won in sixteen days — carried the news of
peace to the Cape of Good Hope in fifty-five days, said
to have been a record at that time, and pressed on to
relieve the uncertainty of the Yankee tea-ships immured
at the Pagoda Anchorage, in fear of the British cruisers
lurking in Macao Roads.

If he wasn’t a red-hot patriot, just the same Jacob was
glad the War was over. It hadn’t really served anyone,
except the Republicans — or Democrats, as they called
themselves with equal facility — ^and this mainly because
of the inept politics practised by the Federalists. New
York, and the country as a whole, was going to know
hard times for years to come: partly the natural conse-
quence of national conditions, partly a repercussion from
the more widespread commercial depression which was
Europe’s normal aftermath to the series of wars that had
continued with slight intermissions for more than twenty
years. It would be another twenty years before shipping
climbed back to where it had been — ^New York, which
had boasted 268,548 tons in 1810, could claim only
231,215 tons in 1820, and this was typical of all the
seaports. But hard times didn’t bother Jacob. The Midas
touch never failed him.

VIII

How the man thrived-r-and-dwindled! Xbrived. as mer-
i^antj'ho^def of dollars j dwindled as inividual in direct
ratio to the increase of His wealth, ^bney gnawed like a.
canker , at. Jacob’s soul. The innate lovaHe .qualities, the
boyish exultation in tasks accorhplished, the zest for ad-
venture and the forest trail, the simple homeliness— all
these diminished their influence upon his character. lie
became harsher, sterner, less sympathetic, more overbear-
ing, reg^dless of othersj cOld-bloodedly selfish. The ac-
quisition of money was everj^hing to him. He coiild
count a million — wasn’t satisfied. Two millibh^ — and

II 8 JOHN JACOB AST OR

chafed that Girard had more. The sufFerings and hard-
ships of men he foreclosed of Hrove to the wall made him'
only impatient. Dumkopfs! It was their own fault.

One virtue remained to him: for his family he couldn’t
do too much or make any sacrifice in vain. Sarah enjoyed
whatever comforts were obtainable, grand clothes, a car-
riage and pair, servants. His daughters were given every
advantage the town afforded 5 they took their place in
the society of the period. William must have the educa-
tion his father was denied: Columbia College, and after
that, Gottingen. Nor were the relatives in Germany
neglected. George Peter, who had assisted him to his job
in his uncle’s factory in London, was brought to New
York in 1816, and set up in the musical instrument busi-
ness at 144 Water Street. The rest, old John Jacob, in
Waldorf, and Melchior and several sisters, were allowed
liberal incomes out of the millions Jacob was squeezing
from fur and tea — and other people’s misfortunes.

He could afford to do all this, but what is remarkable
is that he did it at all, considering the intemperate mean-
ness, the pitiful avarice, he displayed in his business deal-
ings— sometimes to his own discomfort. What are we to
say of the man who refused to buy a chronometer for that
one of his skippers whom he called his ^‘king of Captains”?
This captain. Cowman by name, demanded the instrument
as an aid to navigation on the long voyage to Canton and
return. Aster’s reply was that a chronometer cost $500,
and Cowman had been able to get along very well with-
out it. Cowman’s argument that it would materially
curtail the time required for the voyage, and more than
pay for itself, was curdy dismissed, and he quit Astor
for a merchant who thought as he did — and in his first
voyage under his new employer’s house-flag, brought his
ship into port days ahead of Astor’s, with the result that
the market was glutted with tea before she arrived, and
Astor lost $70,000. But it says much for Jacob that, meet-
ing Cowman on Broadway, he took the sailor’s hand, and

FUR AND TEA 119

admitted his own fault — vass right, Cowman. Sev-
enty t’ousan’ dollar’ I lose for dot chronometer.”

A second captain, who chanced to be at Canton when
Astor’s agent there died suddenly, took measures promptly
and skilfully to establish himself in the dead man’s place,
and so saved his employer the $700,000 worth of prop-
erty involved, which, under the drastic Chinese law,
should have reverted to the Grand Hoppo and the
minions of the Dragon Throne. Upon his return to New
York, Astor thanked this captain profusely — and never
rewarded him with so much as a bottle of wine. Which
reminds me of still a third captain, to whom stingy Jacob
had entrusted two pipes of Madeira to be transported to
Canton and back in accordance with the accepted theory
that sea-air and the joggling of the waves ripened this
wine better than any other means. The day the ship
docked at New York, Jacob appeared on her deck, more
anxious about his Madeira than the thousands of chests
of tea stacked above it. For some obscure reason, he
wanted the two pipes immediately, which wasn’t like
him, for he seldom drank wine, and attached little im-
portance to itj but at any rate, the captain imdertook to
humor him, and put the crew to work, burrowing through
the cargo to where the Madeira lay. It meant two days’
delay in unloading, two days’ extra work} and Jacob,
apparently appreciating this, promised the captain a demi-
john so soon as the pipes were safe in the cellar of 223
Broadway.

Sweating and grunting, the sailors finally reached the
huge, aromatic, damp-streaked hogsheads, and swung
them overside to the waiting dray, with “a yo-ho-ho and
a rumble-O!” And their skipper licked his chops daily,
thinking of the demijohn that should come to his table.
Not many men could afford to lay down Madeira, and
then ship it half-way around the world to impart to it
precisely the right bouquet. But the hogshead never ap-
peared. The ship sailed, made a second voyage to Canton

120 JOHN JACOB AST OR

and returned} and one day, in the counting-room, the
captain remarked jokingly to Jacob: “What about that
demijohn of the Madeira you were going to let me
have, Mr. Astor?” Jacob coughed apologetically. “Ach,
it issn’t fine yet,” he replied. The captain made a third
voyage to Canton, and returning, more for fun than any
other reason, broached the subject of the hogshead again.
Jacob was as apologetic as before — ^“Ach, it issn’t fine yet,
Cabtain.” It never was fine, so far as the Captain knew.

The truth was that Jacob hated to part with any-
thing that came into his possession — ^unless it was for
his family. Perhaps because they seldom abused his gen-
erosity. Sarah’s tastes were as simple as his own } William
was a serious, plodding fellow, burdened with a sense of
responsibility and a liking for the drudgery of detail}
the girls were well brought up, bright, kindly and affec-
tionate. The yoxang people had a secure social position, as
did Jacob and Sarah, in so far as they cared to make use
of it, and all four children made brilliant marriages.
Magdalen, born in the squalor of the two rooms in Queen
Street, married first, in 1807, Adrian Bentzen, a Dane,
who was Governor of the Island of Santa Cruz in the
West Indies, and second, the Reverend John Bristed, from
Dorchester, England, who qmt the ministry for the law,
and became a partner of Beverley Robinson. Dorothea
married Walter Langdon, scion of a distinguished family
of New Hampshire. Eliza carried the family into inter-
national society by selecting Count Vincent Rumpff, a
Swiss, who was Minister of the German Free Cities — still
possessed of a measure of the prestige of the ancient
Hanseatic League — at Paris, and afterward at Washing-
ton. William made his father proud by selecting for a
wife Margaret, daughter of General John Armstrong,
who was Minister of War in Madison’s Cabinet, and of
Alida Livingston.

This last was in 1818, when it could truly be said that
the Astor s were honorably established in the New World,

FUR AND TEA

12,1

allied with as good blood as there was on the Continent.
Jacob was at least as much respected as hated. Sarah was
universally loved. If an occasional boudoir pussy com-
mented that those Astor girls had been born in the Pearl
Street slums, and did you know their father was a cake
peddler — ell, the Astors needn’t take it to heart. Jacob
had become the kind of silent strong man who leads with-
out seeming to. He was never, understand me, an old
hunks. There wasn’t about him any of the outward grime
or slovenliness of the stage miser. Dressed plainly, unos-
tentatiously, he was always neat, paid his employes well,
maintained a comfortable house, entertained agreeably,
contributed to the church, and in moderation, to charity.
The awful thing about his meanness was that it was a
meanness of the sovil, a vice contracted through abuse of
a fundamental virtue. It led him to practices which were
unnecessary, which abased an otherwise noble character.
But it would be imjust to say that meanness was the
machinery of his wealth. There, again, the situation is
infinitely pitiable, for I am persuaded John Jacob Astor
would have been rich, if he had never shaved a note,
foreclosed a mortgage or schemed to exploit the troubles
and oversights of others.

He was now a national figure, next to Stephen Girard
the richest man in America. In i8i6 he was appointed a
director of the Bank of the United States. He was one
of four financiers — ^the others were his old bete noir Nat
Prime, John Hone, and John Robins — who arranged the
Ohio canal loan. His interests were broadening rapidly,
but he refused to permit anything to divert his major
absorption from the two commodities upon which his
fortune was erected. F\xr, as I shall show later, was loom-
ing continually more important in the scheme of things,
the Astor brigades so many spearheads for the white man
in the vague country beyond the prairies and the Shining
Mountains — ^which the trappers were beginning to refer to
also as the Great Stonies. Tea was the principal staple of

122 JOHN JACOB AST OR

the East India trade, the immense revenue from it, how-
ever, attracting so much participation as to cut the profits
for everyone. Still, it was, and remained for some years,
a lucrative article for Jacob to handle, mainly because he
was able to purchase and market it more efficiently than
his competitors.

The arrival of a tea cargo was an event, attracting
popular attention from the moment a panting clerk burst
into the owner’s office — ^“The Becpuer^s in the stream, Mr.
Aston She’s riding deep” — ^until the last chest had been
dispersed at the auction which consummated the venture.
Small boys would jam the entrance to the wharf, snufF-
ing their noses at the pungent aroma wafted from the
matting-wrapped chests the sailors hove up out of the
holds with block and tackle and tailed over the gang-
plank in a double line. Tassersby would stop for a moment
to peer into the fragrant dark interior or eye the salt-
stained spars of the ship and the bulwarks which had been
battered by 14,000 miles of ocean. From the fo’c’s’le
fighting cocks, China Reds, crowed defiance to the lords
of the city’s cock-pits j a lean-faced officer tramped the
poopj from the row of ports poked the muzzles of can-
non, threatening despite the tompions that choked their
throats. What hadn’t she seen, that ship! The palest clerk
could achieve a thrill from her halo of mystery.

Advertisements in the newspapers would shortly an-
nounce an auction of: ‘‘The cargo of Mr. John Jacob
Astor’s ship Beaver, arrived this past week, with 2,500
chests of prime teas, produced last season from the best
Bohea and Sung-lo fields j the sale to be conducted by
Mr. John Hone, the auctioneer, by open bidding, on
Mr. Astor’s wharf, foot of Liberty Street.” And on the
day in question a notable array of factors, dealers and
tradesmen would swarm the wharf, consulting the hand-
bills distributed by the auctioneer’s assistants, gossiping
over the probable values: “I am told the Kongo is excel-
lent, but with an hundred and seventy per cent duty ’twUl

FUR AND TEA 123

come high.” “Ah, well, there are fifty chests of the
Imperial gunpowder. Whettin assures me it cost forty-

two cents the pound, and with a fifty cent duty ”

“Two dollars the pound, sir! Monstrous! I’ll rather bid
on the Hyson. It couldn’t have cost above thirty-seven the
pound, and the duty’s but twenty-five cents.” “They’ll
start it at a dollar, sir. Mark me! If you’ll have a cheap
grade, take my advice, and bid for the Souchong — ^fifteen
and a half cents in the hold, and a twenty-five cent duty.
It shouldn’t go above seventy-five here.”

Beside the auctioneer’s desk stood a huge bowl of
punch, and a courteous negro freedman filled glasses as
rapidly as the bidders presented themselves. There was
a continual buzz of conversation, interrupted periodically
by the suave voice of Mr. Hone, announcing lots, calling
for bids, xirging the prices higher, the staccato exclama-
tions of his patrons so many punctuation-marks in what
amounted to a polite bedlam. Ladies hovered on the
fringes of the throng, and persons who had dropped in
out of cxuriosity nodded to acquaintances, exchanged com-
ments with the merchants who had an interest at stake.
Nobody was in a hurry, as a rule the best of feeling pre-
vailed— ^“Sir, I regret to have deprived you ” “Tush,

sir! Your privilege. I trust you have the right market.”
“May I pass, sir?” “Ah, your pardon, sir.” On such a
day the wharf acquired an atmosphere resembling that
of a drawing-room, but infinitely more romantic and
picturesque, what with the river-smells blowing between
the stacks of chests, the lapping of the water against the
piles, the rustle and creak of the ship, riding a trifle
wearily at her moorings alongside. Brave days, soon
forgotten!

The one difficulty was that the Government had made
things too easy for the tea-merchants. Jacob and conserva-
tive men like him were the prey of irresponsible specu-
lators, who flooded the market, and then, having smashed
prices, and forced the more substantial merchants to absorb

JOHN JACOB AST OR

124

the excess tea in an efFort at least partially to stabilize
prices, themselves went broke and were frixitlessly posted
for the millions they owed the Treasury Department and
their associates. This sort of episode was recurrent, but
matters reached a climax in 1826 when the Philadelphia
firm of Thompson & Company, one of the three biggest
tea houses in the country — the other two being J. & T. H.
Perkins, of Boston, and Thomas H. Smith & Company,
of New York — crashed, after an attempt to swindle the
Government, dragging down Thomas H. Smith & Com-
pany in its fall. Jacob was an innocent victim of this
disaster, his involvement having been due to his efforts
to maintain the market in face of the dishonest methods
practised by Thompson, who had so abused his credit with
the Treasury Department that the Collector of the Port
of Philadelphia refused to accept his bonds for duty on
additional imports of tea.

Thompson was an influential man, however, and
brought pressure to bear upon the Collector, using the
argument, of course, that if he wasn’t permitted to im-
port and sell tea he never would be able to pay the duty
he already owed. As a compromise, the Collector ruled
that Thompson might place his latest importations under
lock in the Custom House, withdrawing them as cus-
tomers appeared and paying the duties on such with-
drawals as he made them. Thompson went through the
motions of complying with this agreement, but actually
turned it to account to perpetrate a clever swindle on the
Custom House authorities. Whenever they issued him a
permit to withdraw one hvmdred chests, acknowledging
therein the payment of duty on this amount of tea, he
would contrive to raise the amount and sum specified to
cover a withdrawal of one thousand chests, shipping his
booty immediately to his New York agents, who dumped
it without loss of time on the market, regardless of what
it did to prevailing prices.

Astor and Smith were so heavily committed that they

FUR AND TEA 125

were compelled to continue absorbing Thompson’s oflPer-
ings to protect themselves against a complete slump.
Their warehouses were already bursting with teas they
had no use for when the Philadelphian’s swindle was
detected, and he was jailed for a defaulter — ^to die in
his cell several months later, the imposing fabric of the
business he had created an evil-smelling heap of ruins
about his ears. They thought their troubles were ended,
but the Treasury Department determined to dispose of
the balance of Thompson’s teas, impounded in the Cus-
tom House at Philadelphia, and offered to sell for the
value of the duties, purchasers to be entided to debenture
on them — ^which meant that the teas would cost pur-
chasers nothing shipped.

This sounded more than fair; a merchant ought to be
able to turn a profit on goods which required no invest-
ment before he marketed them. So Astor and Smith
accepted the Government’s terms, and cast their eyes
abroad for a market, no matter how cheap. But very soon
they blinked with apprehension, for nowhere could they
locate a demand for tea. From Bristol, Southampton,
London, Havre, Hamburg, Bremen, Copenhagen, their
agents reported a glut. Price meant nothing. Merchants
simply wouldn’t xmdertake to buy more teas as a measure
of self-protection; and in desperation, the two Americans
resolved to try the Mediterranean, instructing, their super-
cargoes to accept any offers. But the Mediterranean
peoples were accustomed to obtaining their teas by the
overland caravan routes across Central Asia, and the
Thompson teas went for sums insufficient to pay freights,
duties and other charges.

The one thing Astor and Smith accomplished by their
intervention in the Thompson scandal was the mainte-
nance of the New York market, although in the long run
their efforts here were in vain. Poor Smith, overstrained
by his endeavors to keep pace with Astor & Son — ^the
style of Jacob’s overseas trading firm — ^went the way

126 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

of Thompson, found himself owing the Government
$2,000,000, and was forced to assign. The Perkinses
drew in their horns for the time being, and the tea
market entered upon a period of stagnation which un-
settled business for the next five years. Jacob was thor-
oughly disgusted. He was never one to push a losing
proposition, and he saw that the great days of the trade
were ended. Other men might be satisfied with lower
profits, but not he. In the following year, 1827, he
severed his Canton connections, wound up his domestic
business, sold off a portion of his fleet and threw him-
self with renewed ardor into the development of the
fur made.

Perhaps he must have done so in any event, for compe-
tition was increasing in the fur trade. The white man
was about to occupy definitely the Empire Napoleon had
sold Jefferson in order to keep it out of Britain’s hands.
And from the Mississippi to Alta California the trapper
blazed the way for pack-train and covered wagon.

BOOK FOUR

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE

No American was more keenly appreciative than Astor
of the value of the territory comprised in the Louisiana
Purchase. He had traveled widely at a time when suc-
cessful merchants seldom wandered from the center of
their activities. For years he had been filing away in his
memory the half-legendary tales of the free trappers and
engages of the Canadian Northwest Company, who
brought into the posts at Michilimackinac, Detroit, and
Grand Portage the reports of their journeys to the Shin-
ing Mountains. And his preoccupation with the Canton
and Northwest trades had naturally focused his interest
upon the Pacific coast north of Alta California. Americans
held that Louisiana included this northern coast above
the Spanish lands j Great Britain was inclined to dispute
the claim. And so, through a series of circumstances,
with which he was vitally connected, the title to the coast
became a subject of controversy, and was finally com-
promised under terms unfavorable to the United States.

The story of this episode is the best clue to his char-
acter. The way his mind functioned in meeting its prob-
lems, the attitude and policies he adopted, show the
manner of man he was, emphasizing alike his virtues
and his failings. An empire builder in spirit, capable of
daring and bold conceptions, he was utterly lacking in
the essential gallantry, the selfless determination, which
steel a man to the chancing of high risks and ruthless
prosecution of a cause which seems to fail. It was, whether
he appreciated the fact or not, the great tragedy of his
life. Instead of being remembered as just a rich man,
he might have won an extraordinary niche as statesman
and patriot. But it wasn’t to be. The necessary springs

129

130 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

of ambition were lacking in his makeup, although, I
fiiinkj he would have liked to play the loftier role.
Certainly, he made some pretense to it in old age, and
persuaded easy-going Washington Irving to embalm him
as a disinterested patrioteer in a rather sloppily written
work called “^Astoria.”

There is a tinge of epic quality in the affair, all the
more human, and therefore the more interesting, for the
failure which dogged it. The stake was the coastlands of
North America, from the borders of the Spanish Crown
to the fiords of Alaska, where Count Baronhoff ruled
for the Czar. Had Astor won, Canada would have been
barred from the Pacific, and who can say what might
have been the resulting effect upon the relations between
the United States and their northern neighbor? A Canada
denied a Western seaport must have been urged to closer
ties with American industrialism: all the wealth of tim-
ber, minerals and agriculture that flow to Vancouver
contributing to American prosperity; a railroad linking
Puget Sound with Alaska — ^the possibilities are limitless,
and fruitless to discuss. For Astor didn’t win. But even
in failing, and despite the errors of his course, he estab-
lished the American title to Oregon and its hinterland,
and so helped secure an empire sufficiently ample to satisfy
most Americans, except the rabid breed who presently
commenced to shout: “Manifest Destiny!” By which
cryptic utterance they implied a conviction that Divine
Providence favored the extension of the Eagle’s sway
the length and breadth of the Continent. We have them
with us yet.

There was every practical reason why Astor should be
interested in the Louisiana Purchase. If he thrilled to the
trappers’ stories of hidden lakes, and a Salt Sea sur-
rounded by the habitations of a race of giants, mysterious
walled cities, armies of thousands of horse Indians, moun-

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 13 1

itains crowned with perpetual snow, still, what really
caught his fancy were the descriptions of coundess herds
of animals and rich promise of the small fur-bearers. The
fur trade was entering upon its climacteric period; period
of expansion and cut-throat competition, accentuated by
the realization on all sides that it was the entering wedge
of the white man’s conquest. First the trapperj next, the
setderj then the farm — ^and the village. In the dosing
years of the eighteenth century the sequence was remark-
ably rapid. Daniel Boone, restless under the restraints of
ordered life, already had seen Kentucky wrested from
the Indian, forests leveled to make room for towns, and
had now fled across the Mississippi to the frontier of
Missouri, moving west whenever he heard of a plow.

The colonial government in Canada was alert to the
importance of pushing the fur brigades farther and far-
ther into the unknown, and lent every possible support
to the Northwest Company and lesser competitors. A
fur-trading post was always a nudeus for white men,
an assertion of power. Wherever one was maintained,
there you might find in miniature the dvilization which
was slowly mastering the opposition of nature and bar-
barism. If it was a Canadian post, it stood for Great
Britain and British rule. If it was an American post, it
stood for all the Thirteen Colonies had fought for. And
the Americans were quite as alert as the Canadians. For
Some years the Government at Washington was to main-
tain its own trading-posts in the Indian territories, yield-
ing them only in face of the obvious superiority of private
enterprise for achieving the very purpose it had in view.
And long before this happened, the Federal authorities
were supporting the private companies, in so far as the
law permitted — ^in the case of Astor, rather beyond the
due limits of the law.

The struggle to dominate the trade was as fierce as
any war, involving bloodshed, treachery, every resource
of an acute antagonism. Nor was this merely because of

132 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

opposing national aims. Bearing in mind the relative
wealth of the period, the trade itself, was a fat prize.
It was figured that in the early years of the nineteenth
century 6,000,000 pelts were sold annually at prices
ranging from fifteen cents to five hundred dollars apiece.
Every gentleman in Europe and America, and many
below that arbitrary scale of rank, must have his beaver
hat j and a beaver hat meant at least one pelt, which cost
one dollar in trinkets to buy from an Indian trapper, and
sold in London for twenty-five shillings, which would
purchase English cloth and cutlery marketable for ten
dollars in New York. This, as has been said, was the scale
of values in the first decade of the new century. Some
years later a beaver pelt was worth ten dollars in St.
Louis. Other furs had value, but the beaver was the
standard pelt, and the one most sought.

At this time the outstanding Canadian competitor was
the Northwest Company, which had been organized in
1783. It was the first of the powerful fur companies —
with the exception, of course, of the Hudson’s Bay, which
didn’t enter the American field until near the end of the
struggle. Twenty-three partners composed its directorate,
and on its muster rolls it carried 2,000 employes — fac-
tors, clerks, boatmen, trappers. Most of the partners and
the senior men were Scots 5 the rank-and-file of courier
des bois, and engages were French Canadia|ns and half-
breeds. It was an intelligently managed organization,
progressive and aggressive. One of its chiefs. Sir Adex-
ander Mackenzie, had made the first recognized crossing
of the Continent in 1793, many miles north of what was
to be the American border, however.

A second Canadian competitor, the Michilimackinac or
Mackinaw Company, was actually established on American
soil, and while not so big as the Northwest Company,
was as much of a thorn in the side of the Americans be-
cause of its strategic relation to them. Generally speaking,
the Northwest Company worked the territory west and

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 133

norti of the Great Lakes, and the Mackinaw Company
restricted its operations to the regions below the Lakes,
where the American competition was strongest — ^although
the Americans for years had labored under the handicap
entailed by the occupation of this country by the British
in defiance of the Treaty of Peace after the Revolution.
We have seen how the removal of these illegal garrisons
by the terms of Jay’s Treaty in 1794 had assisted Astor
in an earlier stage of his career.

Many men in his position would have been tempted
to fight the Canadians with the weapons they, themselves,
so casually used — ^rifle and scalping-knife. The smaller
American traders did so at every opportunity. But Astor,
possibly because of past associations, preferred to work
out an amicable relation with them, which implied at
least a partial surrender to their interests: a policy which
should have drastic consequences for all concerned. Yet
he wasn’t disposed to 3neld more than he felt necessary.
Indeed, anyone willing to abandon outright resistance to
the enterprising Northwest brigades must have been de-
nied their respect. So he was eager to develop new trap-
ping territories, and awaited anxiously the reports of the
Lewis and Clark Expedition, dispatched by Jefferson to
survey the Louisiana Purchase.

Very likely, isolated white men had crossed the Rockies
and the tablelands beyond, traversed the Cascade Range,
and glimpsed the surf of the Pacific. But if they did,
they told their adventures only to others as ignorant as
themselves, who were incapable of appreciating the sig-
nificance of the exploit. And if the mere glory of crossing
the Continent means anything, credit should go first to
Mackenzie, although Mackenzie’s expedition was trivial
in its after-effects compared with Lewis and Clark’s,
which definitely turned the nation’s face toward the
Pacific coast. From that moment the country’s destiny,
whether manifest or otherwise, was assured. Not even
Astor’s bunglings could alter the supreme event.

134 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

He was, to do him the justice he deserves, aware of
the ulterior implications of the moment as were few of
his contemporaries. And for that very reason the more
blame attaches to him for his stupid penny-chasing and
fearful seeking of the correct path, when what was needed
was a dauntless rush and a devil-take-the-hindmost spirit.
But he wasn’t that kind of a German, our Jacob. Thor-
ough, systematic, insistent upon details, he would move
just so far as he could see, and trust no subordinate to
see farther. And he did see an American Oregon, saw it,
for him, precipitately. Unwilling to await the formal
report of the expedition, he fell upon Patrick Gass’s ^
Journal, published in 1807, devoured it, realized the
profits awaiting him in the untapped fur countries it
described and envisaged an immense expansion of his
business. The machinery he had employed up to this
time would no longer be sufficient for such tasks j he
must have an instrument to work with which would
allow of the broadest possible range of activities.

So John Jacob Astor, Fur Trader, gave place to The
American Fur Company, incorporated in New York,
April 6, 1 808. According to a descendant of his this
corporation was simply “a fiction intended to broaden and
facilitate his operations” — ^in other words, as will become
apparent when his operations are scrutinized, a holding
company. The first, remote precursor of a corporate device
which was regarded as highly original nearly a century
later. Astor discovered it to be handier, if anything, than
he had anticipated, and adapted it to meet several of the
problems the capitalists of his era hadn’t perceived in
their more restricted dealings.

The capital of $1,060,000 was entirely subscribed by
himself, which gives an inkling of the wealth he had ac-

Gass was the last survivor of the expedition. He died at Wellsburg-,
W. Va., in 1870. It is almost incredible that the events he witnessed
could have occurred in one man’s lifetime.

^ William Waldorf, first Baron Astor, in the Pall Mall Magazine, Vol.
XXV.

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 135

quired. Girard was wealthier, but no other merchant, not
the shipping kings of Boston and Salem, could match
Astor by 1808. It is obvious, too, that he still intended to
make his business a one-man afFair. He had a very definite
plan in view. He’d stretch out his chain of posts along the
Great Lakes to the Mississippi as far as St. Louis, running
a second string along the Missouri westward to the Rock-
ies. Intermediate posts in the mountains would link the
Missouri chain with a third chain down the Columbia
to the Pacific. The main distributing and collecting center
for the eastbound trade would be at St. Louis. A fort at
the mouth of the Columbia would afford a haven for his
China ships, which could load there direct for Canton.
A post in the Sandwich Islands woxild be a stopping-place,
both on the voyage to Canton and from New York to
the Columbia.

A grandiose scheme, but sound. Developed logically,
it must assure him control of the entire region. His
brigades would be so situated that they could repel any
invaders, while the complementary arrangements for mar-
keting the catch would give him an east and west disper-
sion, guaranteeing a maximum of economy. He’d be able
to buy furs cheaper, and sell them at a lower price. But
he wasn’t contented with the arrangements already out-
lined. The Russian Fur Company in Alaska, practically
a Government subsidiary, worked under several difficul-
ties. It lacked transportation facilities at sea, and it was
forever complaining of the depredations, violence, and
opposition of the Boston Northwesters. Astor conceived
the idea of joining forces with the Russians, so that their
fmr-s, too, should pass through his hands. His light-blue
eyes, peering out of their cavernous hollows, contemplated
eventual dominance of the fur trade of the Continent.

He carried the idea to Washington, where Jefferson
bestowed enthusiastic approval upon it — ^“I considered
as a great public acquisition,” the President stated later,
“the commencement of a settlement on that point of the

136 JOHN JACOB AST OR

Western coast of Americaj and looked forward with grati-
fication to the time when its descendants should have
spread themselves through the whole length of that coast.”
But it is to be doubted that Astor considered the project
in as impersonal a mood as did the man who wrote for
his epitaph: ‘‘Author of the Declaration of Independence
and of the Statute for Religious Freedom of Virginia,
Founder of the University of Virginia.” To the fur
trader the whole proposition was simply an excellent de-
vice for making money.

Other men had glimmerings of the same plan. The
Canadian Northwesters were alive to the situation, but
they lacked a real incentive in pushing to the Coast, in
that, as British subjects, by the terms of the East India
Company’s monopoly, they would be denied access to Can-
ton. At the same time, their natural jealousy spurred them
to compete with the Americans for the interior fur coun-
tries, while the American free trappers and traders west
of the Mississippi were quite as jealous of Astor’s com-
pany as they were of the Northwest men. In 1809, Man-
uel Lisa, one of the ablest of the Missouri traders,
organized the St. Louis-Missouri Fur Company, known
historically as the Missouri Fur Company. It was the
first of a succession of independent companies which should
fight the American Company for a generation, blazing
trails the “Trust” followed, as a rule, with lethargic
ingenuity.

It is difficult to understand why Astor didn’t effect
a combination with Manuel Lisa and his men. Instead,
he turned to the Northwest Company, to men who were
Canadians, active trade enemies, who very readily might
become national enemies, in the troubled state of public
opinion. But if such a contingency occurred to him it
Inust have had no weight. He doesn’t seem to have made
any endeavor to interest other American capital or indi-
viduals in his enterprise. The capital he palpably didn’t
jrant, preferring to contribute all, himself, and monopolize

AN 4P0STLE OF EMPIRE 1^7

whatever profits were earned. But his objection to Ameri-
cans as partners is more obscure. It is true that he had
known the Canadian traders for years, and in his yotmg
manhood had gotten along with them when native-born
Americans couldn’t. Possibly, he thought Canadians would
be easier to work with. And he seems always to have been
contemptuous of the American trappers who were the
path-finders of the West. They were a turbulent, law-
less lot, more individualistic than the French Canadians;
but their individualism made for initiative, and as a rule
five of them were worth more than ten of the Canadians
and halfbreeds.

It has been argued, and perhaps soundly, that in at-
tempting to combine forces with the Northwest Company
he hoped to neutralize the opposition of his strongest
rival; and this argument is supported by the suspicion
with which his approaches were received by the Canadians.
They were establishing several posts west of the Rockies,
and felt themselves capable of resisting American com-
petition. Moreover, normal trade and national jealousies
tinctxired their resentment at being offered only a one-
third interest in the new corporation Astor planned to
launch. They spurned an alliance, and he set himself with
misguided subtlety, to undermine them in another fashion
by luring to his service five of their ablest factors— Don-
ald McKenzie, Alexander McKay, Duncan McDougal,
David Stuart, and Stuart’s nephew, Robert.

•On June 23, 1810, he organized the Pacific Fur Com-
pany, the first subsidiary of his American Company/t with
a capital of $200,000, divided into one hundred shares.
Of these he retained fifty shares for himself; his five
Canadian partners received four each; and five went to his
one partner who was a citizen, Wilson Price Hunt, a native
of New Jersey. The remainder were to be distributed
amongst the clerks, with the intention of heightening their
interest in the venture — the whole distribution effecting
what nowada3rs we should regard as a mutualization.

138 JOHN JACOB AST OR

Under the terms of the agreement entered into with his
six partners, Astor was to provide all the equipment re-
quired, vessels, provisions, arms, ammunition, trading
goods, etc., and to bear all losses for five years, his total
commitment not to exceed $400,000. The contribution of
the partners was to be their knowledge and skill j and they
were to have charge of the company’s pioneering work,
plotting of trade routes, building posts, organizing re-
lations with the Indians, surveying trapping grounds.

Superficially, it appears a fair and satisfactory arrange-
ment. There was even an element of triumph in it for
Astor. He had deprived his biggest competitor of the aid
of several of its best executives. And he did not stop here,
either. A majority of the clerks he hired were North-
west Company men. Indeed, so grave were his inroads
upon the personnel at Montreal, Sault Ste. Marie, and
Grand Portage that a fresh crop of hardy, young Scots-
men was required to make good the depletions. And
Astor, reading indignant letters, listening to outraged
comments when he stopped ofF at Montreal, chuckled in-
wardly over the embarrassment he was causing. He was
so satisfied with his policy of kidnapping Canadians to
employ in starting an American fur company, that in the
following year, 181 1, he induced several Northwest Com-
pany partners to join with him in buying out the Macki-
naw Company.

This concern, he argued, was a nuisance to both the
larger companies, competing with the Northwest in
Canada and with the American below the Lakes j the in-
terests of both would be served by a division of its trade
between them. As a company, the Northwest refused to
connive at the obliteration of another Canadian Company;
but equally as a company, it had no objection to in^vid-
uals amongst its partners joining with Astor to remove the
troublesome competitor. And he and his latest batch of
alien associates took over the Mackinaw, reorganizing it
as a new corporation, the Southwest Company, under the

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 139

American Fur Company’s charter. Astor, who had found
most of the money for the deal, was to have a two-thirds
interest in the Southwest Company’s trade in the United
States for five years, after which time it was all to lapse
to him.

Again, this may seem like a long-headed scheme for
the elimination of a competitor 5 but examination of it in
the light of known political conditions at the time arouses
a sense of bafflement. It is all but inconceivable that a man
of Astor’s undoubted intelligence, perspicacity and ac-
quaintance with public opinion should have committed
himself to a policy so obviously bristling with perils. Re-
lations between the United States and Great Britain were
dangerous in 1810, bad in 1811 and hostile in 1812.
Throughout this period, indeed, from about the time
of the blackguardly engagement between the Leopard
frigate and the ill-omened Chesapeake in 1807, there was
a seething current of bitterness separating the two coun-
tries. At sea the British men-o’-war searched our vessels
and pressed our seamen} on the frontier, their agents en-
couraged the Indians to war upon our settlers. The British,
on their part, deeply resented the prosperity which had
fallen to American commerce as a result of the Napo-
leonic Wars. So well-recognized was this feeling that Mc-
Dougal and another of Astor’s Northwest partners called
upon Jackson, the British Minister at Washington, be-
fore sailing with his expedition for the Pacific Coast, to
ask for instructions as to their conduct when hostilities
occurred.

Men took for granted that there would be war — ^all men
except Astor. He continued blithely the preparations for
his great pro jert.. McKay, McDougal, and the two Stuarts
left New York with one contingent in the ship Tonquin,
September 8, 1810. Hunt and McKenzie, with the over-
land expedition, left Montreal July 5- And in March,
18 1 1, an Astor agent sailed for Russia to negotiate an
agreement for co-operation with the Russian Fur Com-

140 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

pany. Everything was going fine, Astor thought. He still
thought so in May after the President frigate had defeated
H. B. M.’s Little Belt sloop-of-war in a purely unofficial
engagement, not in any way, of course, retaliation for the
humiliation of the Chesa'peake, The British would learn
the Yankees had teeth, he concluded. And when, toward
Christmas, the post brought word out of the West of Har-
rison’s defeat of Tecixmseh at Tippecanoe, he reasoned
only that conditions would be easier for his fur brigades
east of the Mississippi. It never occurred to him that if the
British permitted the destruction of Tecumseh’s confed-
eracy to stand, they must lose forever their prestige with
the disgruntled border tribes, who looked to the Cana-
dian officials to support them against the Longknives of
the Ohio valley.

The plans for the joint expeditions, which were instructed
to establish a fort and trading post to be called Astoria
at the mouth of the Columbia River were precisely drawn,
as might have been expected of a mind as prone to meticu-
lous detail as Astor’s. Sitting on the porch of his house
at 223 Broadway, in his office in Pine Street or on the
dock where his Indiamen lay, he had constantly in view
the tremendous potentialities involved. This was no ordi-
nary project of merchantry. Success would make him em-
peror in fact, if not in name, over a domain of limitless
expanse. The fur trade would be his from shore to shore}
he’d be able to manipulate prices so that the proud North-
west Company would have to jump to the tune he played.
And rubbing his muscular hands together behind his back,
whistling softly between pursed lips, he let his imagina-
tion range across the scene of his endeavors — ^the Tonquin,
slanting south with the trades} Hunt and McKenzie and
their bucksldn brigade, poling and towing by cordelle
against the muddy flood of the Missouri} his emissary

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 141

frudging from one stuflFy bureau to another about the quays
of St. Petersburg.

Say this for him. Wrong or right, he made his disposi-
tions, calmly, methodically, and then awaited fate’s de-
cision with an imperturbability which savored somewhat of
Teutonic phlegm. No welcher. No protester. With hun-
dreds of thousands of dollars at stake, he went to his other
afiFairs as whole-heartedly as though the Pacific Fur Com-
pany, the Southwest Company, the American Fur Com-
pany, Astoria, were so many empty words scrawled on a
blackboard in the Tontine common-room. His friends
fretted, worried, snarled at critics. He laughed at them
kindly, enjoyed his flute or an occasional evening of music^
loved his family very heartily — ^and kept a keen watch
for a near-due mortgage or a piece of soxmd property
going cheap.

Lucky for him he accepted uncertainty so easily, for
two years should pass before he’d even hear his expeditions
had reached their destination, two years of shoddy patri-
otism, and political claptrap, and thundering cannon. A
little more energy in his conduct, a little less stolidity, -a
flare of the impersonal vision so lacking in him — and he
wouldn’t have waited two years for that message. But
great men are as much a prey to their weaknesses as any
pxiling, thumb-sudring infant. The Astoria venture might
have furnished material for a splendid national saga. As
matters fell out, the best we can say for it is that it drama-
tized Oregon for our people, fixing in the memories of a
busy generation the fact that our flag had flown on the
Pacific Coast.

The story of the expeditions falls properly into two dis-
tinct chapters, one party traveling by water around Cape
Horn, the other tracking the steps of Lewis and Clark.
And inasmuch as the Tonquin contingent started first and
arrived first, we may give them precedence, qualifying
this concession with a reminder that the overland journey
was infinitely more difficult.

j42 JOHN JACOB AST OR

A stout little ship, the Tonqum, two hundred and ninety-
tons burthen — about the size of an ordinarily hefty tug-
boat— ^with ten guns in her battery, and a crew of twenty
men. For master, Astor had especially engaged for this
voyage. Lieutenant Jonathan Thorn, an officer of the
United States Navy on leave of absence. Thorn was a
veteran of the Tripolitan fracas, a very fair sample of
the average naval officer of the period, honest, opinion-
ated, loyal, childishly touchy. A good, but not an inspired,
seaman, and handicapped by the routine of the naval serv-
ice. He -was, as matters turned out, the very last man for
the job in handj but he was precisely the sort of con-
scientious martinet who would infallibly appeal to Astor.
If Thorn hadn’t been appointed the Tonqmn^s master,
you may be sure the Navy List would have been ransacked
for another of the same stripe — “a gunpowder fellow,
who’d blow all out of the water if there -was a fight,”
Astor described his captain to the Northwest partners on
the ship’s passenger-list. A recommendation which as-
sured the Canadians in a belief that the skipper was anti-
pathetical to them.

Swaggering Highlanders, -vain of their names and line-
age, cadets of families ruined in the Jacobite intrigues,
these gentry had been impregnated -with the feudal atmos-
phere of the Northwest Company. All four were as quar-
relsome as Alan Breck. Each had a skein dhu ready to bare
for any fancied insult. They held Americans, Yankees,
in a contempt which was with difficulty restrained, and
were impatient of all rules and restrictions not formulated
by themselves. Captain Thorn they marked down for an
enemy the first night out when he issued orders that the
cabin-lights must be doused by eight o’clock. McDougal,
chief troublemaker, promptly seized a pistol, and vowed
he’d drill the skipper’s heart, confirming Thorn’s suspi-
cions of their disloyalty — suspicions which were only too
just, as was afterwards proven.

But neither Thom nor the employer of them all knew

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 143

the worst. It was months before Astor came to under-
stand the extent of his blunder in dispatching a British
force to establish an American post — of the thirty-three
Pacific Fur Company men aboard the Tonquin, all four
partners were British subjects, as were eight out of eleven
clerks, and fifteen of the eighteen subordinate employes.
These last, Canadian voyageurs, harum-scarum, roistering
sons o'£ the forest, had come from Montreal to New York
by canoe, making of their journey a gay gasconade, in
mockery of the Americans they passed among, scaring the
peaceful Dutch farmers of the Hudson valley with their
scalp-yells and war-whoops, plaguing the women they en-
countered with bawdy songs and amorous advances. They
arrived at New York in great style, paddling around the
Battery to the accompaniment of loudly bawled chansons,
their painted buckskin garments and bright featherwork
attracting the curiosity of the street crowds. The city, at
first, regarded them with interested amusement; but soon
issued particular instructions to the watch. Astor, dis-
turbed by their alien ways, insisted they must become
American citizens prior to the Tonqmn*s departure, and
was told they had fulfilled his stipulation, only to dis-
cover, too late, that his Canadian partners had lied to
him.

It is difficult to see why he should have been surprised.
There was open talk in New York, before the expedition
sailed, that the Northwest Company was tampering with
its members; and reports came from Halifax of an armed
ship of the Company, which was to overhaul the Tonqmn
at sea and press the British subjects aboard her for the
King’s fleet, reports so persistent as to induce Astor to
procure his vessel the escort of the Constitution frigate.
Captain Hull, tmtil she was out of sight of land. To tell
the truth, the Northwest Company had no wish to deter
the Astoria expedition from sailing. The Company, and
the colonial authorities, who were likewise apprised of
all that went on, could have asked nothing better calcu-

144 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

lated to support their interests than the inclusion in the
advance party of so many ardent British partisans.

You might suppose, in view of these circumstances, with
the war-clouds hovering lower, that Astor would have
altered the composition of the Tonquin^s company at the
last moment. He could have, had he chosen to, for it is
ridiculous to say, as Irving does with sycophantic servil-
ity, that he was unable to obtain the services of Americans,
skilled and competent in the lore of the fur trade. Such
men were plentiful on the border, and in years to come
should frustrate the opposition of the Northwest and
Hudson^s Bay Companies, and prosecute the most ex-
haustive explorations of the regions still unknown be-
yond the Rockies. They were, individually and collec-
tively, the ablest frontiersmen on the Continent. But they
were incorrigibly independent, and must always be handled
with gloves. Not for them the iron caste system of the
Northwest Company, the arbitrary feudal ranking of voy-
ageur, courier de bois, clerk, factor, partner. One man
was as good as another, in their simple philosophy. And
Astor, influenced by his instinctively European concep-
tion of business and society, shrank from dealing with
their kind. He preferred the Scotch Highlanders, who
ruled their fur brigades as so many dans, and the French
Canadian trappers, whose boisterousness was balanced by
the ingrained respect of peasants for their seigneurs.

The Astoria expeditions were organized as they were
because their backer wished them to be so organized} and
the troubles they encountered were merely what any in-
telligent person could have forecast. Canadians and Ameri-
cans hated each other at this stage of history as we friendly
neighbors of today can scarcely believe possible. A con-
siderable portion of the Canadian population was com-
posed of Tory exiles from the original Thirteen Colonies}
and by a strange quirk of human nature, the Scottish emi-
grants, almost entirely the oflFspring of Jacobite families.

. AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 145

were fanatically loyal to the Hanoverian dynasty their
forefathers had fought to dethrone. Yet Astor preferred
these rabid Royalists and despisers of Yankees to Ameri-
can woodsmen, who refused to doff their coonskin caps
when they entered a factor’s store.

By a readily understandable and amusing inconsistency,
the feudal-minded Scots and French Canadians aboard
the Tonqmn found no difficulty in contracting a savage
animosity against Captain Thorn, who was far closer to
their type than he was to the average American of the
day. To them, in the first place, it was a joke for any
man to have been an officer in the American Navy, which
was one of the biggest jokes, by itself, anybody had ever
heard of. A dozen or so bundles of pine boards called
frigates and sloops-of-war! And expecting King’s ships
to exchange salutes with its dirty, crank craft! And this
dour laddie. Thorn — aye, and full of ’em he was, nae
doot! — setting up tae be an officer, God save us! Him that
was captain of a lousy merchant ship presuming to dic-
tate to chentlemen, whose fathers and grandfathers had
the right of entry to Holyrood and could muster twa-
three hundred claymores for a Low Country chaunt.

It wasn’t to be thought of, and so, in the narrow quar-
ters of the little Tonquifiy a ceaseless bickering divided
her company into two opposed groups. The four Scots
partners persisted in regarding the vessel as a vehicle for
their convenience, to be managed in accordance with their
wishes, and her master as no more than the servant of their
company charged with her navigation. Captain Thorn,
worthy man, had definite instructions from Astor, and
maintained that the partners and their followers were but
passengers, who were as much imder his orders as mem-
bers of the crew. He seems, in the main, to have been
right} but he was one of those terrible persons who can
be right with offensive determination. And he was any-
thing but tactful in his handling of the innumerable petty

146 JOHN JACOB AST OR

disputes which arose partially from sheer lack of occu-
pation for the landsmen in their months of enforced idle-
ness.

Still, he should be commended for resisting the de-
mands of the Scots to visit the islands oiE Africa, merely
to satisfy their curiosity and enable them to boast that
their travels had extended so far afield. And if he had tar-
ried at every palmy isle of the West Indies they cried
for, given them a run ashore in Patagonia — ^to look for
the fabled giants j permitted them to refresh their liter-
ary memories on Robinson Crusoe’s Island} and strayed
off his track to exhibit the beauties of Easter Island —
Well, it is quite on the cards Astoria might never have
been founded at all. He did, requiring water, furnish
the company a diversion by putting in at the Falklands,
and had so much trouble securing attention to his em-
barkation signals that in a fury he made sail, and left be-
hind him two of the partners, McDougal and Stuart the
elder, who, with six lesser wights, pursued the Tonqmn
for three and a half hours, tugging breathlessly at the
oars of their quarterboat.

McDougal and McKay had delayed coming aboard a
few days previously at another landfall in the Falkland
group, and Thorn was firm for teaching them a lesson, nor
could he be deterred by young Robert Stuart, who pre-
sented a pistol to his head on his own quarterdeck, and
threatened to blow him to eternity if he did not order the
helm put up — ^but, he wrote Astor of the incident, “had
the wind (unfortunately) not hauled ahead soon after
leaving the harbor’s mouth, I should positively have left
them; and, indeed, I cannot but think it an unfortunate
circumstance for you that it so happened, for the first
loss in this instance would, in my opinion, have proved the
best, as they seem to have no idea of the value of prop-
erty, nor any apparent regard for your interest, although
interwoven with their own.”

To make the situation more disagreeable for Thorn,

McDougal and Stuart with Six Lesser Wights Pursuing the Tonquin

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 147

the Scots quarreled with one another when they weren’t
quarreling with him 3 and the main cabin resounded
nightly with their fantastic disputes over precedence, and
who was superior at this or that. But with all the unpleas-
antness the Tonquin made headway, rounded Cape Horn
on Christmas Day of 1810, and on February ii, 1811,
dropped anchor oflF Hawaii, where the partners and clerks
and their Canadian henchmen must have opportunity to
see where Captain Cook was killed, and make acquaintance
with the luscious brown maidens they had heard so much
about. The Scots, to achieve a better impression, donned
kilt and tartan, and informed Kamehameha, the King of
the Islands, that they were eris, or chiefs, the King being
sufficiently impressed to sell poor Thorn at a good, stiff
price, the fresh meat, fruits and vegetables required for
the common health, and permit the enlistment of twenty-
four of the Islanders to augment the TonquitAs crew in
the dangerous seas she should visit, and assist the French
voyageurs in operating the canoes and small craft neces-
sary for collecting furs along the banks of the Columbia
and its tributaries.

Despite the break in the monotony of the voyage, the
spirit of the company wasn’t improved. The Tonquin had
barely sunk the mountains of Oahu astern when a fresh
altercation burst forth. McDougal and his allies had ab-
stracted some equipment and materials from the goods
destined for the post, and Thorn protested vigorously,
asserting the cargo was under his control as skipper. For
answer McDougal brandished his protocol from Astor
as chief of the landing party, in charge of the erection and
management of the post pen^ng the arrival of Hvint with
the overland column. But Tlmrn persisted, and finally Mc-
Dougal, a little, peppery man, as self-sufficient and im-
portant as the sailor, told him flatly the Canadian party
were the stronger numerically, and intended to do as they
pleased, regardless of his wishes.

Thorn conceived this as rank mutiny 3 yet one way or

148 JOHN JACOB AST OR

another a truce -was patched up, until the captain’s sus-
picions were reawakened by observing the Scots to speak in
Gaelic whenever he was within earshot. This implied only
the one thing to his fevered imagination: his baiters were
plotting to take possession of the ship, and very probably,
to murder him. The truth was that the Scots talked Gaelic
to annoy him, and for no other purpose. It wasn’t in the
scope of their tentative plot to. take the ship or divert the
expedition from its purpose. ‘They wanted to reach the
Columbia, and build a trading-post as soon as possible —
if for no other reason, because they happened to know
that the Northwest Company had dispatched a brigade
overland to outrace Hunt, and establish a post in advance
of the Astor men. And if they, as old Northwest men,
hoped to drive a profitable bargain someday with the com-
pany they had deserted, they were assured from experi-
ence they must have a worthwhile stake to offer. Their
whole purpose, in so far as it had yet taken definite shape,
was to play both ends against the middle. With consistent
Scots thriftiness, they hoped to cash in by (a) getting
all they could out of Astor 5 (b) serving the Crown j and
(c) holding up the Northwest Company for better jobs
than they had formerly held. Of course, they also had in
view a fourth reward, in the shape of satisfaction over
the destruction of the American attempt to occupy Ore-
gon j but unfortunately, they couldn’t devise a fourth way
to profit by their projected efforts.

So the “mutiny” boiled out in denunciations and accusa-
tions. The one result was to complete the unsettlement of
Thorn. He was so badgered and harassed that, I suspect,
his seamanship suffered. Arriving off the mouth of the
Columbia on March 22, he made a great todo over find-
ing a channel across the bar, losing his chief mate and
seven men, the most of two boats’ crews, in attempts to
reconnoiter a passage of the breakers, and seemed more
disposed to pick quarrels than to assist the landing parties
in the establishment of the post, which it was as much his

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 149

duty to promote as theirs. But the irate McDougal, vrho
was on his own element at last, was more than a match
for Thorn’s obstructive tactics, and succeeded in forcing
the Tonqum*s skipper to accept his plans. A site was
picked on Point George on the south side of the river’s
mouth, and here the ship landed the stores and equipment,
including tools and materials for the building of a small
schooner.

You must pry deep in American history to come upon a
journey so fraught with drama, hardship, and stubborn
heroism as that of the oyerland brigade Hunt led from
Montreal to Astoria. Illstarred in its inception, a prey to
the same blindness to contemporary conditions which
marred the T enquires voyage, it was infinitely more event-
ful, serving to re-emphasize in the popular imagination
the potentialities of the vast range of country Lewis and
Clark had explored. Many ships had rounded the Horn
and attained the Northwest Coast. Only one other column
had forced the defiles of the Rockies and the arid wastes
of the plateaus beyond, where the Snake River thundered
sinuously through a succession of forbidding gorges to a
confluence with the Columbia.

In his original instructions Astor associated in the lead-
ership with Hunt the fifth of his Scotch partners, Donald
McKenzie, who had spent ten years in the service of the
Northwest Company, was familiar with all the details
of the fur trade, used to handling savages and the scarcely
less savage white men and halfbreeds who composed the
fur brigades, and had won frontier fame as a rifle-shot.
Astor’s thought, of course, was that McKenzie’s knowl-
edge of border conditions would atone for Hunt’s de-
ficiencies in the same field, the American’s sole qualification
for command being his experience as a trader in St. Louis.
Himt had never traveled beyond the frontier or led men
on the march or in battle, or found his way through un-

JOHN JACOB AST OR

ISO

known country. On the other hand, he possessed genuine
intelligence, probity and determination, and was by far
the most attractive of the partners associated with Astor
in the Pacific Fur Company.

Hunt and McKenzie left New York in July for Mon-
treal, where, in accordance with Astor’s crazy purpose
to employ Canadians rather than Americans, they were to
recruit their personnel. In Montreal, however, they en-
countered the quiet opposition of the Northwest Com-
pany, eager for any chance to put American rivals to
greater expense. The voyageurs were disposed to be fear-
ful of the transcontinental journey, and reluctant to com-
mit themselves to so long a term of employment as the
five years the Pacific Fur Company required j but a month’s
propaganda and lavish expenditure of money secured the
nucleus of an expedition, and on July 5 the partners
started by canoe for Michilimackinac, hoping to have
better luck there.

It was the same story over again, though. The Macki-
naw Company — still a separate entirety — ^was as jealous
as the Northwest Company. The voyageurs were mainly
interested in securing heavy advances of pay, and then
evading their obligations. Hunt — or, more probably, Mc-
Kenzie, who knew his people better — finally hit upon the
crafty dodge of issuing ostrich feathers and cock’s plumes
to members of their brigade as a uniform distinction, and
this so entranced the childish Canadians that they were
as eager to be enrolled and to start upon the venture as
formerly they had been unreliable and unwilling. More-
over, Hunt had a real stroke of luck in the accession to
his ranks of a young Scotch-American named Ramsey
Crooks, who, after a period in the employ of the North-
west Company, had been working as a free trapper up
the Missouri. Crooks was destined to become one of the
leaders of the fur trade, and a rich and distinguished mer-
chant. His first service to his new employers was to point
out the insuffidency of their force of thirty men. He was

Thorn Lost His Chief Mate and Seven Men Attempting to Reconnoiter a Passage of the Breakers

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 151

recently returned from an expedition to the headwaters of
the Missouri, where he had experienced the hostility of
the Sioux and the Blackfeet, the two most dreaded tribes
in that area. Any small expedition must arouse the cupid-
ity of these fearless raiders, he asserted, and urged the
recruitment of the brigade to a strength of sixty, and with
this object in view, an adjournment of their efforts to St.
Louis.

Hunt and McKenzie accepted his advice, and after a
series of carouses for the benefit of their voyageurs — ^in-
evitable prelude to a journey in the wilderness — left
Michilimackinac early in August, driving their enormous
birchen canoes over the customary route of the fur-traders
from Green Bay, via the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers, to
Prairie du Chien, and so down the Mississippi to St. Louis,
as yet a huddle of cabins crowding about several glaringly
new brick houses and stores, the whole clinging to the
edge of the bluff a few miles below the mouth of the
Missouri. Here they were amongst Americans once more,
although the population included many Frenchmen and
Spaniards, reminiscent of Louisiana’s mingled Latin her-
itage. Here, too, they were confronted once more by the
jealousy of a rival company.

The Missouri Fur Company, only two years old, and
battling vigorously to maintain itself against the hos-
tility of tribes egged on by the Northwest Company,
couldn’t regard favorably the entrance of another Ameri-
can company, which its personnel regarded as actually a
mask for the operations of their Canadian competitors.
Lisa, the dominant figure in the Missouri Company, bent
his influence to cripple the newcomers, who would have
had a hard tinie without Hunt’s knowledge of the local
population and Crooks’ prestige with the free trappers.

It was September 3 when the Astorians reached St.
Louis, too late in the year to contemplate the ascent of
the Missouri to the foothills before winter should lock its
waters under icej but Hunt and McKenzie, very sensibly.

152 JOHN JACOB AST OR

determined to remove their men from the temptations
of the little settlement, and make as much westing as
safety permitted, at the same time saving money by putting
the brigade in a position where its members could feed
themselves with the game which fell to their rifles. On
October 2i they set out, and by November i6 had sailed,
poled or towed four hundred and fifty miles to the mouth
of the Nadowa, where the imminence of freezing weather
prompted them to establish a permanent camp. In the
course of this journey they were overtaken by a mes-
senger from St. Louis, bearing a dispatch from Astor, in-
structing Hunt to assume unrestricted command of the
expedition j McKenzie henceforth was to be merely his
chief lieutenant. This move, prompted by the discovery of
treachery in the Tonquin^s company after the ship had
sailed, came too late to do any real good, its one result
being to embitter McKenzie and lead him to regard Hunt
with *an ill-feeling which further complicated a situation
already over-complicated.

Hunt seems to have mistrusted McKenzie on his own
account, and possibly Astor’s decision was partially influ-
enced by complaints forwarded by his American partner,
either from Montreal or Michilimackinac. Whether this
was so or not. Hunt took immediate advantage of his new
authority to promote Joseph Miller, a former Army
officer, whom he had engaged, to a partnership, and, de-
ciding to return to St. Louis to conclude his arrangements
for additional men and supplies, appointed Miller jointly
with McKenzie to command the camp. The two evidently
didn’t get on well together, since five of the American
trappers in the camp pursued Hunt to St. Louis to com-
plain of conditions there — ^apparently, the Americans,
greatly in the minority, were at odds with the French
Canadian voyageurs, and the partners, sufficiently inimical
personally, were unable to adjust the dispute to the satis-
faction of the more independent faction. It was, first and
last, an impossible situation.

V pet mission of the Peabody Afuseum, Salem, Afas^.

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 153

In St. Louis, Hunt’s chief business was the hiring of
an interpreter, and after a deal of fussing, he selected
Pierre Dorion, a Sioux halfbreed, son of Old Dorion,
who had filled a similar position with the Lewis and Clark
expedition. Dorion had been working for the Missouri
Company, and quitting in debt to its commissary, his em-
ployment by Hunt was resented by Lisa, who took every
possible recourse, including the novelty of legal proceed-
ings, to lay the ’breed by the heels. This very natural pro-
cedure operated to confirm Hunt in a suspicion of Lisa,
which had been inculcated by Crooks who credited the
Spanish-American with having stirred the Sioux to attack
him on his recent expedition. So, when Lisa made overtures
to Hunt, offering to join the Astorians with a Missouri Fur
Company brigade he was leading up-river to provision
his posts. Hunt declined, notwithstanding the immunity
from the savages guaranteed by so numerous an array of
rifles.

Hunt did, however, secure the services of enough
Lotusiana and Canadian French voyageurs to double the
roster of his original company. He was also joined by two
of those wandering Englishmen, whose amateur explora-
tions and scientific researches have thrown light on the
shaded corners of the world. John Bradbury, a botanist of
Liverpool, was to enrich the store of early knowledge of
the West with his “Travels in America,” and Thomas
Nuttall later would contribute “Travels in Arkansas” and
“Genera of American Plants.” They appear to have been
gentlemen of a very pretty spirit, a peculiar blend of the
adventurer with the comic stage scientist, constantly
blundering into hot water and alwa3^ managing to extri-
cate themselves — or get extricated. To make the company
more representative, Dorion insisted upon bringing along
his squaw and their two papooses.

The departure from St. Louis was hastier than might
otherwise have been the case, because Hunt was anxious
to precede Lisa up-river, convinced that the Missouri Com-

154 70HiV JACOB AST OR

pany chief would rouse the Sioux against the Astoria
brigade, if he had the opportunity. A suspicion, on the
whole, unsupported by the available evidence. Lisa, like
all his kind, was no saint — on the contrary, a relentless
partisan. But he stands unconvicted of persecution of the
Astoria men, once they had abandoned the petty business
jealousies of civilization, and he did make every decent
profFer of alliance with them to resist savages who showed
as much enmity to his party as to Hunt’s.

I am going at length into an apparently trivial subject
because the animosity which sprang from this incident —
or, rather, series of incidents — ^poisoned the relations of
the competing American companies for many years to
come. In the first place, there was Astor’s ignoring of
Americans in organizing his brigades. This stimulated
the resentment of every American trapper and trader,
except the handful who were invited to join by Hunt,
and several of these were not native born. The Americans,
with the Missouri Fur Company as a rallying group, did
what they could to make it difficult for the Astoria brigade
to recruit men who would contribute to its efficiency. But
— and this is decidedly to their credit — when they realized
that the Astoria brigade was going up-river, they buried
the hatchet, and offered td pool forces for the safety of
both parties. They were experienced frontiersmen, and
while willing to war against men of their own color in
the absence of an Indian menace, the moment Indians ap-
peared, all white men were friends to them, and all red
men enemies. This formula the Astoria leaders refused to
subscribe to. They carried ordinary trade rivalry to its ut-
most extreme. As a consequence, throughout the struggle
for control of the Northwest, which was waged as much
by the trappers of the contending nations as by their
statesmen, the American fur companies were divided in
effort, and never gained the results tfieir enterprise
deserved.

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE

155

On the way back up the Missouri to the mouth of the
Nadowa, Hunt’s party touched at the village of Charette.
Here, as their keels grounded, they were hailed by an aged
giant, whose unbending frame and eagle glance gave
the lie to his white hair. With an understandable pride,
he invited their attention to a bale of sixty beaver pelts he
had trapped upon a lone expedition from which he had just
returned. He might, too, have indicated to them a stal-
wart brood of sons and daughters and grandchildren, all
of either sex and any age above the cradle competent
rifle-shots and fearless pioneers. And had he wished, sitting
erect at their campfire that evening, he might have said:
"Waall, strangers, ye’ll go fur afore ye see what I ain’t
seed.” For this old man was Daniel Boone, the symbol
of the frontier. Ever since the day, as a younker, he had
tramped through Cumberland Gap, and peered down
from the last westward bulwark of the Blue Ridge at
the limitless forests of Kaintuck, he had been in the van
of the white man’s progress. In the twilight of life he had
fixed his habitation here in the most remote settlement
of the advancing frontier, roaming in summer across the
prairies to within sight of the Black Hills and the Big
Horn range. His envy of their mission was as honorable
an accolade as these adventurers could have craved.

And in the morning before they took to their boats they
were joined by another man, tanned and bearded, power-
ful of frame, John Colter, earliest of the individual ex-
plorers amongst the free trappers. Colter had gone to
Oregon with Lewis and Clark, and upon their approach
to civilization had left them to resume the wild life he
preferred. He knew the recesses of the Rockies as did no
other American, and was regarded with a mixture of re-
spect and humorous derision by his contemporaries as
the discoverer of what they dubbed “Colter’s Hell” — the
country now known as Yellowstone Park. His accounts of

156 JOHN JACOB AST OR

sulphur lakes and boiling springs and gigantic, geysers
were incredible to men who had no conception of what
such phenomena could be, and so, for an old man’s life-
time, Colter was popularly considered a clever liar, to be
forgiven as such both for his ingenuity and his proved
pluck in action. He was very anxious to accompany Hunt,
but had recently married, and felt unable to sever his
new ties. Poor fellow, he died — of all diseases for one of
his hardy frame, of jaundice! — a few years later.

On April ry. Hunt’s party arrived at the winter camp
by the Nadowa and, so soon as the Spring rains had ceased,
embarked for their adventure, making what headway they
could against the swollen current. It would be fruitless
and uninteresting to describe in detail their experiences
during the ensuing weeks. Constantly threatened by In-
dians, they suffered no losses, and were chiefly concerned
by the tidings that Lisa was in pursuit of them with a
small brigade. They made every endeavor to keep ahead
of him, their hostility accentuated by the fact that they
were within the sphere of the dreaded Sioux, with whom
he was reputed to exert an uncanny influence j but on the
verge of the Arickara country he overhauled them, and
after a number of personal disputes, which fortunately
stopped short of bloodshed, at a council held with the
savages, displayed a friendly impartiality which convinced
all of his good intentions. Discovering that Hunt intended
to abandon the river at this point, and proceed on horse-
back, he also helped the Astoria men by offering to buy
their boats, making the trade in horseflesh, in order to ac-
commodate them.

So heavy was the demand for horses for the Astoria
party that the price per head jumped to ten dollars in trade
goods, and bands of young warriors were dispatched by
the Arickaras to steal stock from the Sioux and other near-
by tribes. Lisa and his men, while doing all in their power
to assist the Astoria brigade, didn’t attempt to hide their
belief that Hunt’s party would never reach the Pacific

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 157

Coast; and the effect o£ such talk was disastrous to the
morale of the more timorous recruits, some of whom
would have deserted but for the strong measures Hunt
initiated. It is dilEcult to blame them. Although the coun-
try ahead had been penetrated by numerous white men,
the greater portion of its area was still unknown, and the
legends circulated about it were as wild as anything
included in Greek mythology. All sorts of strange, out-
landish beasts were desaibed — dragons, giants, nations of
fierce, pygmy warriors. Wanderers who had glimpsed the
ruins of the Cliffdwellers enlarged upon what they had
seen, and spoke of castles in the sky and walled cities a
man would require a day to ride around.

The height of the mountains was much exaggerated.
So late as 1836 Professor James Renwick, of Columbia
College, wrote Irving that he had been assured by Simon
McGillivray, a partner of the Northwest Company, that
the Rockies were as high as the Himalayas — one peak
had been ascertained by a Mr. Thompson, by means of
barometric and trigonometric measurements, to reach
25,000 feet. Irving, himself, painted a dismal portrait of
the belt of territory at the eastern foot of the mountains,
which, for generations yet should be dubbed “The Great
American Desert” — ^and is today one of the richest wheat
countries in the world.

“It is a land where no man permanently abides,” he
wrote; “for, in certain seasons of the year, there is no
food either for the hunter or his steed. The herbage is
parched and withered; the brooks and streams are dried
up; the buffalo, the elk, and the deer have wandered
to distant parts, keeping within the verge of expiring
verdure, and leaving behind them a vast uninhabited
solitude, seamed by ravines, the beds of former torrents,
but now serving only to tantalize and increase the thirst
of the traveler. . . . Such is the nature of this immense
wilderness of the far West, which apparently defies
cultivation, and the habitation of civilized life. Some

158 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

portions o£ it along the rivers may partially be subdued
by agriculture, others may form vast pastoral tracts, like
those of the Eastj but it is to be feared that a great part
of it will form a lawless interval between the abodes of
civilized man, like the wastes of the ocean or the deserts
of Arabia; and like them, be subject to the depredations
of the marauder. Here may spring up new and mongrel
races, like new formations in geology, the amalgamation
of the ‘debris’ and ‘abrasions’ of former races, civilized
and savage; the remains of broken and almost extin-
guished tribes; the descendants of wandering hunters
and trappers; of fugitives from the Spanish and Ameri-
can frontiers; of adventurers and desperadoes of every
class and country, yearly ejected from the bosom of
society into the wilderness.”

So much for the proud states of Oklahoma, Kansas,
Nebraska, the Dakotas, and eastern Colorado!

Small wonder the faint-hearts of Hunt’s brigade balked
at perils the very vagueness of which inspired additional
terror. The bravest trappers were uneasy that day, July
1 8, they trotted out of the Arickara villages, and toned
their faces toward the unseen rampart of the Shining
Mountains. There was no merriment, no tossing of coon-
skin caps or shooting of rifles in the air. Every face was
grim or fearful — except one. Dorion’s squaw rode at the
tail end of the column, a four-year-old clutching her from
behind, a two-year-old in her arms, a third life stirring
in her womb. Her flat, bronzed features were impassive.
If she was concerned for the future, she showed it no
more than the pain occasioned by her partner’s periodic
beatings. Humble, uncomplaining, always ready to do
what she could, she earned the respect, even the liking,
of these rough men, to whom an Indian woman was a
beast of burden approximating the value of a good horse.
Of the sixty-four souls in the brigade, she was perhaps
the most attractive and interesting — and unfortunately,
one of the least known, although enough of her adven-

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 159

tures were recorded to present her in retrospect as a
courageous and faithful mother, a loyal — ^if unwedded —
wife, and a stout comrade.

Day by day, Hunt led his column westward, sixty-one
men, a woman, two children, eighty-two horses. They
rode warily, scouts ahead and on either flank, camp-
guards and horse-guards watching through the nights,
and struck the banks of the Snake River on September 26,
crossed this stream and climbed the Teton Pass, the Teton
Peaks their landmark, to Henry’s Fort on the Henry
River, the outermost outpost of the white race, estab-
lished by Major Andrew Henry, a partner of Lisa’s, the
preceding year. The post was deserted when the Astorians
visited it, Henry and his men having gone east with their
fur-packs to meet Lisa at the Arickara villages j but the
log huts afForded shelter for the adventurers.

Already, grave dissensions had begun in their ranks.
McKenzie resented more than ever being imder a com-
mander whom he regarded as his inferior as a frontiers-
man. The American hunters and trappers disliked the
Canadian voyageurs, who were laborers rather than
fighting menj and the Canadians, in their turn, were
jealous of the Americans. The Americans preferred to
ridej the Canadians, boatmen by profession, naturally
^ wanted to keep to the rivers. Miller, the newest partner,
dissatisfied with his share of authority and suffering from
an ailment which made riding uncomfortable for him,
took sides with the Canadians in this last difference of
opinion, and from the moment the expedition crossed the
Divide and reached the headwaters of the streams flowing
westward advocated the abandonment of the horses and
a resumption of travel by water. Hunt was loath to
commit himself to so radical a step, but the balance of
sentiment was overwhelmingly against him, and after
several weeks of campfire bickering he was driven to
assent to it. A dogged, honorable man, he lacked the
spark of genius which constitutes leadership, and was

i6o JOHN JACOB AST OR

never able to dominate his men or to inspire them with
confidence in his judgment.

It was October 8, when the brigade reached Henry’s
Fort, and nearly two weeks were reqmred to fell trees
and make fifteen canoes, in which the stores and pro-
visions were embarked. The horses were left at Henry’s
Fort in care of two Snake Indians, and that was the last
any white man ever saw of the remuda. At first, every-
thing went well. The Henry River carried them down-
stream to its junction with the Mad River, the united
streams becoming the Snake, itself a confluent of one
of the upper branches of the Columbia. But the Snake
proved to be unnavigable. A canoe was upset, with loss
of stores, one of the Canadians was drowned, and finally,
on October a 8, Hunt was constrained to abandon the
canoes above a devastating whirlpool the party named
the Caldron Linn.

Here they cached the bulk of their stores, for they
could take with them only the limited quantities they
were capable of carrying on their own backs j and for
better convenience in securing food in a barren country,
as well as to insure the selection of a practicable route,
they broke up into several detachments, the principal ones
commanded by Hunt and Crooks, who had forged rapidly
to the front under trial of adversity. McKenzie, with
five men, struck off toward the North, in hope of com-
ing upon the main stream of the Columbia. Reading
between the lines of the fragmentary records, I gather
that he was disgusted with Hunt’s inefficiency, and
determined to complete the journey unencumbered.

It was November 9, when Hunt and Crooks, with their
detachments, headed westward again on foot. Each man
carried a twenty-pound pack, in addition to his equipment
and arms, most of the contents of the packs being trade-
goods which they anticipated using to procure provisions
from the Indians. They were dreadfully short of food,
their supplies amoimting to forty pounds of Indian corn.

Used by permission of the Missouri Historical Society

Manuel Lisa

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE i6i

twenty pounds of grease, five pounds of ‘‘portable” soup
and five and a quarter pounds of dried meat apiece — ^but
this store they hoped to reserve for emergencies, expect-
ing to shoot game and catch fish for their ordinary wants.
None realized the true seriousness of their plight: lost
in a wild and scantily inhabited region of untracked
mountains, their only neighbors the poorest of savages,
and winter coming on.

The weeks that followed were ghastly. They wandered
back and forth, seeking horses to ride, seeking food to
eat, sometimes seeking water to drink, at the last, seeking
any practicable outlet from the mountains. Hunt’s de-
tachment took one side of the Snake, Crooks’ the other.
They were in trouble from the start. The few Indians
they met. Snakes and Shoshonies, were so hungry, them-
selves, that the priceless tools and weapons the white
men offered to trade for horses and dogs were more often
refused than not. There wasn’t any game, and very soon
they knew starvation. Horse meat became something to
dream of ; dog meat was a delicacy. More than once they
boiled old pelts for soup, chewing afterwards at the
softened hide. So, weakened and discouraged, the re-
duced brigade stumbled over the rocky ground, buffeted
by snow, drenched by rain, their garments torn, their
feet bleeding. Through it all Dorion’s squaw, lugging
her two children, indifferent to the approach of her time,
kept up with the men, helped about the cook-fires — ^if
there was anything to cook — and was stoically cheerful
imder every hardship. One of the several scrawny mounts
they cajoled from the Snakes was allotted to her and her
offspring on the march, and no matter how voracious the
company, every suggestion to consign it to the pots was
promptly vetoed.

On December 30, she gave birth to a child, and the
trappers and voyageurs, to whom Christmas had been no
more than a date, gathered in groups, and chuckled at
the anomaly of the situation, chewing at strips of hide

i62 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

to stay the cramps in their stomachs. It was impossible
to delay the march, so Dorion was left with the horse to
attend her, and the brigade pushed on. Nobody expected
to see her again, but a day later she rode into camp with
her infant in her arms, considering the feat quite as a
matter of course. Yet, with all her stolid determination,
she could not keep the waif alive in that bitter, bitter
cold. It died within a week. Several of the men were
dead, too, and a number of sick, including Crooks — ^worn
out by his exertions and responsibilities — ^had to be
abandoned along the way, wherever shelter was afForded.
Other men wandered off from the line of march, des-
perate with hunger, and disappeared beyond the bleak
horizon, never to be seen again. The whole party were
on their last legs when they blundered out of the moun-
tains, January 8, 1812, and descended into the warm
valley of the Umatilla River.

Here they rested, awaiting word from Crooks and the
rest of the casualties, but after two weeks had passed,
and none of the sick heard from. Hunt regretfully de-
cided they must continue down the Umatilla to the
Columbia, which, in turn, they followed to a point below
the Dalles, where they obtained canoes from the river
tribes, who likewise gave them their first news of Astoria
— ^after their own privations, they were prepared to hear
of the failure of the Tonquin expedition or the destruc-
tion of whatever post had been established. The realiza-
tion that comrades awaited them at the mouth of the
river was all that was necessary to renew their confidence.
They launched forth again with the current, and two
weeks later, on February 15, saw in the distance the Stars
and Stripes floating from the seaward bastion of the
fortalice McDougal had built.

In the picturesque crowd — Americans, voyageurs, Ha-
waiians, squat, bow-legged Chinooks — ^that swarmed the
strand to meet the newcomers were Donald McKenzie
and the men who had started with him from the Caldron

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 163

Linn. McKenzie had reached Astoria four weeks past,
and had given up the main party for lost. It was more
than a year and a half since the expedition had started
from Montreal. Hunt was three hundred and forty days
out from St. Louis — ^but of these one hundred and forty
had been spent in camp — and estimated he had traveled
3,500 miles, although the direct distance by rail over
the route he used is 2,300 miles. Behind him he had
strewn a scattering of fugitive parties and casualties, all
his stores, all his horses, all his provisions. He and the
survivors of the overland brigade arrived with the ragged
clothes on their backs, their arms and a little ammunition.
Of the grandiose scheme for the journey, the one point
actually accomplished was the transference of so many
men across the Continent. No attempt had been made to
erect a single one of the chain of posts by means of W’hich
Astoria was to have been linked with St. Louis.

Hunt’s mission, up to this time, had been a failure.

Hunt wasn’t the only one of the leaders of the enter-
prise who had fumbled a glorious opportunity, but not-
withstanding inefficiency, jealousy and tentative treason,
the groundwork had been laid for a rich trade on the
coast. McDougal, in the midst of his perpetual bickering
and nagging with Captain Thorn, had managed to secure
the erection of a fort sufficiently strong to resist Indian
attacks, with magazines and storehouses, and a schooner
for developing a coasting trade. When he and his men
were safely housed. Thorn put to sea — ^June 5, 1811,
this was — on a trading adventure to Nootka Sound. The
instructions Astor had issued Thorn specifically cautioned
the irascible skipper to beware of the known treachery of
the Vancouver Island tribes — all mishaps on that coast,
Astor wrote, had been the result of over-confidence on
the part of the white men. Thorn, however, was thor-
oughly out of temper as a consequence of his months of

i64 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

quarreling with his associates and a word of warning
from MdCay, who sailed with him as supercargo, was
as good as a dare to him. He was also singularly lacking
in diplomacy in his dealings with the Indians, and de-
liberately insulted the chief of one tribe on the Tonquin^s
deck. McKay and the Indian interpreter, who had been
hired for the cruise, both advised the captain to up-anchor
and away after this incident} but Thorn’s acknowledg-
ment was a taunt. He wouldn’t run from a pack of
thieving savages. Not he! And next morning trade was
resumed as usual on the ship. More and more Indians
came aboard, all wearing fur mantles which concealed the
weapons they carried — ^and Thorn still slumbering in his
bunk. When he finally appeared, in response to appeals
from his officers and McKay, the waist was jammed with
sullen Indians, and his order to weigh anchor and make
sail was the signal for a massacre, in which he and McKay
were among the first victims. Lewis, a clerk, mortally
woxmded, with three of the seamen, barricaded himself
in the cabin, and the Indians, after killing the rest of
the crew, and looting all the cargo they could get their
hands on, made off.

During the following night, at Lewis’s suggestion, the
three seamen fled the Tonquin in one of the small boats.
Lewis, hopeless of life, was resolved upon a revenge
which should be a warning to the Coast tribes. He went
on deck at dawn, and beckoned the hovering canoes to
board again. Then he locked himself below, and so soon
as the stamping of excited feet on the deck overhead
assured him a numerous passenger-list, dropped a fuse
into the powder-magazine, under the lazarette. The Ton-
quin exploded in one burst of shattered timbers, and with
the wreckage went Lewis and more than a hundred of
the marauders, blown to bits. But the Indians had their
revenge. The three miserable sailors who had fled in
the night were driven ashore down the coast, captured
and tortured to death. Of the twenty-three in the Ton-

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 165

quills company not one remained alive, except the in-
terpreter, who, after a term of imprisonment, contrived
to escape with tidings of the disaster.

This was a nasty blow, but a nastier was to fall. Not
long after the Tonquin sailed, a couple of Indians from
the upper Columbia fetched W’ord to Astoria of the
establishment of a post on the Spokane River by the
Northwest Company. The tangled motives of Astor’s
Scotch-Canadian partners prompted them to do all they
could to ofF-set whatever commercial advantage might
accrue from this move, and David Stuart, the elder, was
preparing to embark with a detachment of trappers to
found a rival establishment in the same neigh^rhood,
when, on July 15, David Thompson, one of the North-
west Company’s partners, arrived at Astoria, an emissary
sent expressly to checkmate the aictivities of the Pacific
Fur Company. If Astoria hadn’t been built, he would
have rushed forward the balance of his brigade, and
undertaken a similar structure immediately. As it W'as,
he made the best of the situation, experiencing no diffi-
culty in cementing relations with McDougal, who was an
old friend and entertained him royally during the week
he remained.

An odd and perverse character, this fellow McDougal,
a master at trimming his sails to exploit the varying winds
of fortune. The Pacific Fur Company, John Jacob Astor,
the Northwest Company, Thompson, his partners, the
United States, Great Britain, were pawns to be moved
to suit his advantage. So far as I can find, he was the
one person to profit concretely by the ikstoria venture.
In the case of Thompson’s visit, for instance, he made
use of the opportunity to assure himself of the North-
wester’s friendship; but none-the-less, he sent Stuart east
with Thompson up the Columbia to establish a Pacific
Fur Company post to compete with the Northwest
Company — ^and, I take it, be a constant reminder to
the Northwest Company of the advantage of throttling

1 66 JOHN JACOB AST OR

the opposition of the American company, and the neces-
sity, in that connection, of offering satisfactory terms to
one Duncan McDougal.

Stuart established a post on the Oakinagan River,
where it falls into the Columbia, and put his men to
trapping and opening trade with the Indians. In the mean-
time tidings of the Tonquin's destruction had reached the
Chinook tribes dwelling on the lower Columbia, and fil-
tered from them into the main post. The attitude of the
Indians changed from deference to watchful antagonism.
If the Great Canoe of the white men could be taken so
easily, why not the log huts in which they stored the
riches so tempting to savage appetites? McDougal, no
fool, sensed the danger of the moment, and put his men
to work fortifying the post, which was soon enclosed
in a rectangular palisade, ninety feet square, with two
bastions mounting four-pounders. And lest gunpowder
should be insufficient to awe his red neighbors, he sum-
moned a council at which he displayed a mysterious bottle,
the contents of which, he assured his hearers, was the
dreaded smallpox. See! He had but to draw the cork —
and Death would run through the villages! The Chinooks
were appalled. Better anything than the disease the Bos-
ton Northwesters had introduced to them. By the con-
cluding week of September, when McDougaPs Canadians
had finished a stone barracks, the Indians asked merely
to be friends.

The winter was peacefiJ and fairly prosperous. Alex-
ander Ross, one of the clerks, who afterwards wrote an
entertaining work, “Adventures of the First Settlers on
the Oregon or Columbia River,” reported that he spent
one hundred and eighty-eight days of the winter six
hundred miles up-river, and in that time obtained 1,550
beaver pelts, besides other furs, which he estimated to be
worth £2,250 in Canton, and which had cost the com-
pany 5/4 d. each, or a total of £35 sterling. Speaking
of the Indians, Ross said: “So anxious were they to trade

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 167

and so fond of tobacco that one morning I obtained one
hundred and ten skins for leaf tobacco at the rate of five
leaves per skin, and at the last, when I had but one yard
of white cotton remaining, one of the chiefs gave me
twenty-nine prime beaver skins for it.” It appears from
this and other evidence that Astor hadn’t been too opti-
mistic in judging the probable profits of a trade direct
between the Columbia and Canton.

With the arrival of the remnants of Hunt’s brigade,
there was reason to expect a considerable extension of
the work, allowing for the questionable purposes of
McDougal, McKenzie’s discontent, and Hunt’s failure
to adapt himself to demands so entirely foreign to the
methodical routine of commerce. The Dolly schooner had
been launched the past October 3, and was available for
cruises in the Columbia’s estuary and along the coast; at
least a beginning had been made of the task of sun^eying
the country, establishing intercourse with the tribes, learn-
ing the peculiarities of the Indians and the probable yield
of fur. There was a sufficiency of trade goods on hand,
and the partners confidently expected the early arrival
of another ship from New York — ^a confidence not mis-
placed, for Astor, in October, had dispatched the Beaver,
with a full cargo and for passengers, John Clarke, a newly
recruited partner, a native American; five clerks, all
American; fifteen American laborers, and six Canadian
voyageurs. He had learned his lesson, and was trying
desperately to give the Americans a preponderance at
Astoria; but unfortunately, he was in the position of the
farmer who started to lock his barn door the night after
the horse thieves paid their visit.

Shortly after Hunt’s arrival it was decided to send
reports of the several expeditions to New York, and John
Reed, one of the clerks who had attended Hunt on the
westward journey, was chosen to carry them. There
were seventeen in the brigade that left Astoria, enough,
McDougal and Hunt thought, to assure a safe passage

1 68 JOHN JACOB AST OR

into the bad lands of the mountains: but at the Long
Narrows, where the canoes and cargoes must be portaged,
they were set upon by a thieving band, who dwelt across
the river in the village of Wish-ram, and Reed was
wounded and his dispatches stolen for the sake of the
shiny tin box which encased them. In the circumstances,
Reed abandoned his trip to New York, and continued
with young Robert Stuart to Oakinagan, where Stuart’s
uncle had remained through the winter. The elder Stuart
determined to return down-river with this party to confer
with the other partners, and on the way they had the
good fortune to encounter Crooks and John Day, one of
Hunt’s American trappers, left behind for sickness the
preceding winter. The fugitives were entirely naked,
having been pilfered by practically all the Indians they
encountered. Remember Crooks. The man had a destiny.

The Stuarts and Reed arrived back at Astoria on May
II to find the Beofver at anchor, and the post humming
with activities. Clarke brought word of the approval by
Count Pahlen, Russian Minister at Washington, of Astor’s
suggestion of an alliance with the Russian Fur Companyj
and among the first decisions reached by the partners was
one to send Hunt north in the Beaver to New Archangel,
the main Russian post in Alaska, to confer with Count
BaronhofF on the measures to be initiated by the two
companies. But more than ever, it was felt, an attempt
should be made to communicate with Astor, and Reed
having failed, Robert Stuart was delegated to try. He
set out on June 29, and with him went Crooks — ^the latter
as disgusted as the other Americans who had come out
with Hunt, and who plainly resented the Canadian man-
agement of the post — two Kentucky hunters, and two
voyageurs.

Their journey was as exciting as Hunt’s had been,
their vicissitudes as dramatic; but it may be sufficient if
I merely touch the high lights, reciting the loss of their

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 169

horses at the hands of the Crows, their rescue of Miller
and three trappers detached by Hunt, their flight before
a second band of savages, and the long, wintry trek out
of the mountains to the headw'aters of the Platte, where,
early in April of 1813, a stray Oto tribesman informed
them that the Great White Father in Washington was at
war with King George.

Imagine their sensations! For nine months out of touch
with their own kind, for nearly two years ignorant of
what went on in the civilized world, they emerged from
the mountains to learn that they were enemies. Stuart
and the Canadians, technically, were on one side of the
fence} Crooks and the American trappers, on the other.
What were their feelings? What arguments did they
hold? How did they decide upon their course of action?
I can’t say — except that internal evidence tends to show
there was no ill-feeling amongst them, while the positive
fact is that they pressed on as rapidly as possible to con-
vey their own news to Aston, curbing his impatience as
best he could in New York, the thundering gxms of the
British blockaders off Sandy Hook a perpetual reminder
of the troubles his own thoughtlessness had brought upon
the enterprise.

It is pleasant to be able to record that Stuart and his
uncle, regarded through the vista of a century, convey
an impression of simple honesty and sincerity, traits
conspicuously lacking in the other Northwest partners.
Certainly, Stuart the younger was as faithful in the per-
formance of his mission as Hunt could have been — and
a deal more efficient than the Jerseyman. After a tem-
porary stop at Fort Osage, westernmost outpost of the
United States Army, to confirm the Oto’s tidings from
the garrison, he continued his descent of the Missouri,
arriving at St. Louis on April 30. A few days later, Astor
stepped out upon the porch at 223 Broadway to read the
evening paper, and the first item which struck his eye

170 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

was a brief dispatch reciting the arrival of the Astorians
on the Mississippi. He enjoyed his game of checkers that
evening for the first time in months.

VII

A MAN with less phlegm than Astor possessed must have
had his nerves shredded raw by the recurrent anxieties
which starred the years following the sailing of the
Tonquin. But during this interval he wasn’t idle, not-
withstanding he continued to display the amazing short-
sightedness and deficiency of resource which had marred
his launching of the Astoria scheme. Having dispatched
the Beaver, he made no attempt to push a supporting
expedition overland, salving his misgivings by continual
talk of such a step throughout the crucial period of the
enterprise. Had he followed up Hunt’s brigade, the
whole tenor of affairs might have been changed. A rea-
sonably strong column, American in complexion, tracking
Hunt, would have made better time, picking up the
wreckage of the advance in its progress and establishing
on the way small permanent posts to keep open communi-
cations with the upper Missouri. Thus reinforced, too,
the Americans at Astoria might have blocked McDougal’s
machinations and constituted an element sufficiently nu-
merous to maintain the all-important outlet on the Pacific.
It is inexplicable why he didn’t take this step after the
declaration of war. He had every reason to do so. His
information service in Canada kept him informed of the
plans of the Northwest Company, and he knew almost
at once of the intention of the rival concern to wrest from
him control of the rich Columbia basin. And while, super-
ficially, it was easier and cheaper to send help by sea,
a force that went overland was surer to reach the des-
tination, and could accomplish more in the course of
its journey.

His conduct is incomprehensible. In part, I suppose, it
was dictated by unwillingness to risk more money. In part.

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 171

it was a reaction from his lack of national feeling. He
couldn’t, for all his protestations, look at Astoria as more
than a convenient trading-post for the Pacific Fur Com-
pany. According to his own statements, he expected the
Federal Government to send forty or fifty men to occupy
the fort McDougal had built, and he was astonished that
President Madison, in the midst of an unequal contest,
should neglect to oblige him. The Government, of course,
with the best will in the world, was utterly unable to
protect the population on the seaboard and the immediate
frontiers. There weren’t enough troops to withstand the
Indians loosed by British agents, let alone detach a com-
pany for duty 3,000 miles from the center of hostilities.

In this attitude the Administration was short-sighted,
if excusably so 3 but Astor was more short-sighted still,
considering the investment he was committed to, not to
have seized firm hold of the situation, spent $100,000
or so additional, and hurried off forthwith the reinforce-
ments he had been considering so long. There was in
New York at this time a lank, raw-boned, young Dutch-
man named Vanderbilt, working day and night ferrying
stores to the harbor forts. He would never have stood
by supinely, waiting on the Government to come to the
rescue of a stake in which he was so heavily interested.
Not he! In similar circumstances, forty-five years later,
he organized a war to safeguard his property from men
who would have taken it from him. But Astor’s character
wanted the vein of daring courage which made Cornelius
Vanderbilt the most powerful financier of a generation.
He was content to address memorials to the President,
and the Secretary of War, and the members of Congress,
and to complain mildly to his friends. I wonder if a
higher blood-pressure would have helped him any.

On the eve of the declaration of hostilities, his St.
Petersburg agent had returned with the approval of the
Russian government of his proposition for an alliance
with the Russian Fur Company in Alaska. Astor ships

JOHN JACOB ASTOR

l’J‘2.

were to carry provisions to the Russian trading-posts,
receive furs in payment for this service, and if agreeable
to the Russian agents, convey their catch to Canton to be
disposed of on commission. The agreement was to run
four years. But there wasn^t time to ratify it before war
came, and Astor knew that the Russian Government, in
alliance with Britain against Napoleon, would never be
willing to recognize it, now. Another dream shattered!

With all his distortion of vision and perspective, there
is something appealing about the steadiness with which
he stuck to his purpose. From watching and comparing
the two men, you can discover why he chose Hunt to lead
the overland expedition. They were much alike: not
clever, not chance-taking, slow-thinking, but doggedly
persistent and stubborn in a rather blind way. Men who’d
take the wrong turn, adopt the wrong policy, and then,
realizing failure, pick up the threads of their effort and
try again — ^with inextinguishable confidence in the course
which had led them astray.

It was typical of Aster’s attitude that he hesitated to
venture one of his own ships in the Atlantic, and to as-
sure the continued provisioning of Astoria, wrote by a
chance letter-of-marque to Captain Sowle, of the Beaver
— which he made sure must be heading for Canton — ^to
load whatever was necessary for McDougal and Hunt
at that port, and ferry it across the Pacific. But then
came intelligence via his underground route from Mont-
real of the early dispatch by the Northwest Company of
an armed ship capable of battering down Astoria’s walls
and compelling the surrender of the post. Frantic to warn
his representatives, he hastily outfitted the Lark, his
fastest ship, and sent her to sea March 6, 1813, with a
communication to Hunt, which is pathetically illustrative
of his inability to comprehend the realities of the situation.

Complaining of the rmgratefulness of the Northwest
Company — ^what on earth did he expect from his chief
competitors? — ^he wrote, in naive fury:

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 173

“Were I on the spot, and had the management of
afFairs, I would defy them allj but, as it is, everything
depends upon you and your friends about you. Our en-
terprise is grand, and deserves success, and I hope to God
it will meet it. If my object was merely gain of money,
I should say, think whether it is best to save what we
can, and abandon the place 5 but the very idea is like a
dagger in my heart.”

And in trusting vein, added:

“I always think you are well, and that I shall see you
again, which Heaven, I hope, will grant.”

Two weeks after the Lark sailed, however, he heard
again from Canada that the British Admiralty had de-
tached the Phoebe frigate to escort the Northwest Com-
pany’s ship Isaac Todd^ of twenty guns, to the Columbia.
He was off, hot-foot, for Washington at once, and this
time, with the help of his friend Gallatin, Secretary of
the Treasury, he commanded the attention of the Admin-
istration. There had been that War Loan to place in recent
months, you’ll recollect, and he was one of the stalwarts
who rallied to its support. Something must be done for
so useful a citizen, and the Navy Department promised
to send the Adams frigate to sea, with orders to take
station in the Colxxmbia.

All possible diligence was made at the New York Navy
Yard in fitting the Adams for her voyage, and Astor,
himself, commenced loading another ship of his fleet, the
Enterfrise, to attend the frigate. While this was toward,
about the middle of June, Stuart’s cfispatches came to
hand, with a covering letter from the bearer. The dis-
patches and Stuart’s report were rosy in tonej the Beaver
had arrived safe; the fur catch was handsome; the North-
west Company hadn’t made any trouble. True, the
Tonquin was lost, and twenty-three men with her, not
to speak of a score or so of desertions and casualties in
the overland journey and local exploring and trading;

174 JOHN JACOB AST OR

but the general outlook was as promising as Astor had
dared hope for.

In describing his sensations years afterward to Irving,
he said:

^‘I felt ready to fall upon my knees in a transport of
gratitude.”

Better than this, though, I like the remark he made
to another friend who saw him at the theater the night
after he received the first news of the Tonquin’s destruc-
tion— ^^‘I’m surprised to see you here, Mr. Astor,” ex-
claimed the friend. ‘‘You are very calm, sir.” “What
would you have me do?” Jacob answered a bit testily,
with that guttural accent he was never able to conquer.
“Stay at home, and weep for what I cannot help?”

Very soon he had ample cause to weep, for as the
Adams lay in the stream, crew and stores aboard, await-
ing a favorable wind, a hurry-call came from Commodore
Chauncey, in command on Lake Ontario, for seasoned
hands to man the impromptu fleet he had built. There
was an emergency, and the plight of Astoria went by the
board. The Adams* crew were sent up-state, and the
frigate docked at the Navy Yard to rot the war away.
Chauncey, who had been one of Astor’s captains before
entering the Navy, quite unintentionally blocked his
former employer’s last effective bid for the empire of the
Northwest.

VIII

Months since, Astoria had heard of the war. The sulky
McKenzie, dissatisfied with his own post on the Shahaptan
River, had visited Clarke’s post at the junction of the
Pointed Heart and Spokane !IWvers in search of company.
Here, about Christmas of 1812, he met two Northwest
Company men, one of whom was McTavish, a partner in
the Canadian concern. McTavish had heard of the declar-
ation of hostilities by Congress in the preceding June, and
the Pacific Fur Company men decided McKenzie must

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE lys

carry the news to Astoria — McKenzie, disgusted with the
whole business, asking nothing better than the opportunity
to repeat to his compatriots down-river the swaggering
boasts of McTavish as to what would happen to Amer-
icans who had dared to challenge Britain.

All for scuttling the ship, McKenzie, as he sat in the
factor’s room of the stone barracks inside the barricade,
the winter rain drizzling on the roof, elaborated the
disasters, threats, promises and gibes of the doughty
McTavish. And he had a ready listener in McDougal,
already sadly disturbed by the protracted absence of Hunt,
who had sailed August I2, last past, to open negotiations
with Count Baronhoff, expecting to return in a couple of
months. Here it was January i6, 1813, five and a half
months — and no word of Hunt. Had the Beaver gone
the way of the T onquin? McDougal agreed with McKen-
zie she must have; the two were blithe to believe any old
wives’ tale their fancies conjured out of McTavish’s
budget of hostile gossip.

What were they to do when the Northwest Company’s
armed ship appeared in the offing? Not later than the
approaching March, McTavish asserted. Their four-
pounders would be helpless against her twelve-pounders.
And a husky brigade of Northwesters was coming
overland, as well. The two Scots wagged their heads
forebodingly — ^‘‘Aye, mon, yon Dutchman’s ower mim.
He’ll do weell tae come oot wi’ the breeks he stands in.”

‘‘Nae doot, nae doot. And Hunt, puir loon ” “He’s

nae better man nor McKay, ye’ll ken. And didn’t the
bluidy red deevils gi’ Mac a daud wad hold him tae
Judgment Day?” “Aye, ’tis nae time for claverin’. Him
that’s pawky’ll have an e’e tae what’s cornin’.”

The resiilt of their havers was a decision to abandon
the country, not later than the approaching July i, and
McDougal gave McKenzie dispatches to take up-river to
Stuart, the elder, and Clarke, the one American partner
remaining, instructing them to make arrangements to

176 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

evacuate their trading posts, and utilize their stores and
peltry to obtain horses and provisions for the trans-
portation of the united brigade eastward over the moun-
tains during the svimmer. In the course of this errand,
McKenzie encountered McTavish, the Northwest man,
with two canoeloads of voyageurs, descending the Co-
lumbia, with the purpose of awaiting the Isaac Todd at
Astoria. Far from making any attempt to resist this
invasion of enemies — ^McKenzie had seventeen men — ^the
recreant Astorian speeded McTavish on his way, and
pushed forward the more zealously to disband the Amer-
ican trading organization in the interior. But Stuart and
Clarke were not of the same mind with himj the Ca-
nadian partner, like the Americans, refused to dodge at
shadows. Both had had good seasons, and obstinately
declined to heed McDougal’s orders to dissipate their
stores in purchases for a retreat they believed unneces-
sary. Instead, they returned down-river with McKenzie,
their canoes loaded deep with fur-bales.

At Astoria they found McDougal and his Canadians
fraternizing jovially with McTavish’s company. The
American clerks at the post, outnumbered two to one,
could only stand aside and glower j the rank-and-
file, himters and voyageurs, were mainly Canadians.
McTavish, out of provisions and ammunition, would
have starved to death or been slain by the Indians if
McDougal hadn’t aided him. The Northwest man was
palpably disappointed by the non-arrival of the Isaac
Todd, but attempts by Stuart and Clarke to capitalize
this as a cause for optimism were combatted by McDougal
and McKenzie with the coxmter-fact of the BeaveiAs dis-
appearance and the lack of any other relief ship.

The situation was a stalemate. It was too late to think
of crossing the mountains before winter set in, and
McTavish was so thoroughly discouraged that he deter-
mined to return up-river to the Northwest Company’s
post on the Spokane for further information and rein-

'AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 177

forcements. But to make this trip he required an outfit
for which he applied to McDougal, who summoned a
conference of the four partners present to pass upon the
request. All they had to do, in the circumstances, was to
refuse help to the Northwest men, and McTavish must
have come to terms with them 5 but McDougal calmly
proposed that they utilize the occasion to sell out to the
Northwest Company their own post on the Oakinagan,
inasmuch, he alleged, as they hadn’t sufficient goods to
maintain Astoria together with its interior posts. The
Scot went so far as to state that the Pacific Fur Com-
pany’s stock on hand was inferior to that held by the
Northwest Company at Fort Spokane, which was an
imtruth — ^an untruth the more absurd because in the
same breath he secured from his partners, now begin-
ning to lose confidence, assent to furnishing McTavish
$858 worth of trade goods for the Northwest man’s
up-river trip.

It is difficult to understand how Stuart and Clarke were
prevailed upon to back water so completely, except on the
supposition that McDougal was a rascal of strong per-
sonality and plausible speech. Certainly, he did not pause
at falsehood, and in addition, he had the prestige of
seniority. Stuart, himself a Canadian, must have been
at least partially sympathetic with old friends like
McDougal and McKenzie, however much he disagreed
with them upon occasion. Clarke was the junior of all
the partners, and not distinguished for good judgment.
To win their case in the conference, McDougal and
McKenzie had, first, to secure the alliance of Stuart,
probably with pleas of national and racial tiesj the next
step was for the three Scots to bear down upon Clarke
with gloomy representations of their common plight,
abandoned on a remote and inhospitable coast. The Ca-
nadians might not dare to resist an attack by their
countrymen. To do so would be treason. For the hand-

178 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

ful of Americans resistance could mean only death or
captivity.

At any rate, McDougal won. The four partners, on
July I, signed a manifesto, approving the provisioning
of McTavish’s party and the sale to the Northwest Com-
pany of the Pacific Fur Company’s Spokane post, and
besides this, declaring their intention to abandon Astoria,
if, by the ensuing June i, 1814, they did not receive aid
from New York. This document, if you please, was
placed in the eager hands of McTavish to send east by
the Northwest Company’s own couriers! And the North-
west man departed, entirely satisfied, on July 5, taking
with him three of the Canadian clerks from Astoria, who
honorably decided to seek engagements in keeping with
their allegiance.

Highly elated, the glib McDougal set about the
strengthening of his position, with a weatherwise eye to
the future. Despite the scantiness of trade-goods he had
advanced as an excuse for relinquishing the Spokane post
to the Northwest Company, he insisted that his partners
must not suspend their accumulation of furs during the
months ahead of them, no matter how uncertain those
months should be, and dispatched three trading parties
into the interior.

What was McDougal’s purpose in this policy? I think
it is impossible to doubt that he sought to fill up the
magazines at Astoria, so that he should have a better
basis for bargaining with the Northwest Company. For
another thing, he was anxious to keep his partners occu-
pied at a distance, in order that there might be none at
Astoria to question his authority. Even McKenzie, who
was a puppet to his will, he ordered on a hunting expedi-
tion into the “WoUamut” country. And not content with
such precautions, he proceeded to strengthen his authority
amongst the Indians by taking to wife — ^by their own
nuptial ceremony of barter and purchase — a daughter of
Concomly, chief of the Chinooks. All this within the

'AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 179

space of a few weeks following the first appearance of
McTavish. It is unescapable that McDougal was striving
by every means so to consolidate his position that he
should be the dominant figure in any ultimate bargain
which might be struck.

That he wasn’t amiss in what he did was proved on
Au^st 20, when a strange ship was sighted off the bar,
which might be either the Isaac Todd or an American
relief expedition. She was neither, as it turned out; but
the American ship Albatross ^ chartered by Hunt at (Dahu.
The Beaver, delayed in Alaskan waters, he had sent on
direct to Canton, lest she lose the fur market’s best
period, staying her voyage barely long enough for Cap-
tain Sowle to put him ashore in the Sandwich Islands.
Here, impatiendy awaiting an opportunity to regain
Astoria, he watched daily from the harbor heads, until
the Albatross came in from Canton, with the first news
to reach him of the war — ^news which made it all the
more imperative for him to return, and likewise, to throw
a fresh store of provisions into the post. So, with praise-
worthy zeal, he bought all the suitable stores the islands
afiForded, and chartered the Albatross for $2,000 to make
the voyage. His distress over the situation he discovered
upon his arrival, nearly a year overdue, may be appre-
ciated. But the mischief had been done. The only recourse
open to him was to save Astor as much loss as possible
by the removal of the accumulated peltry. This couldn’t
be managed in the Albatross, homeward-bound with a
cargo of tea; but Captain Smith, her skipper, planned
to stop in the Marquesas group, and agreed to carry
Hunt afterward to the Sandwich Islands, where he could
leave the twenty-five surviving Islanders transported to
the coast in the Tonqmn and the Beaver, and perhaps
connect with a relief ship or some other available craft.

It is idle to discuss at this distance what might have
been effected had Hunt been able to consult with Stuart
and Clarke, both of them sent upcountry by McDougal.

i8o JOHN JACOB AST OR

With their votes he would have had a majority in any
conference of partners, but he seems not to have con-
sidered it worthwhile to await the calling in of those
associated with himself and McDougal in the responsi-
bility. Very likely he was justified in reaching this deci-
sion, for McDougal surely plied him with all the
threats received from McTavish, and enlarged upon the
imminence of a naval raid. In any case, Hunt, badgered
and dismayed, made his decision with commendable
promptness, and sailed, with the Sandwich Islanders, in
the Albatross on August 26, six days after his arrival.
The single outright mistake which might be chalked
against him — although here, again, it is scarcely fair to
blame a man so harried and misinformed, through no
faxilt of his own — ^was his delegation to McDougal of
sole authority to negotiate with McTavish any arrange-
ment which might seem desirable, in the event of his
failure to return to the Columbia by January i, 1814.
He should have known, by this time, McDougal’s gen-
eral imtnistworthiness. His excuse must be that he couldn’t
have helped himself, short of putting McDougal under
arrest, and for this he lacked the requisite force.

The Albatross made a quick passage to the Marquesas,
and a few days later was joined by the Essex frigate.
Captain David Porter, with a squadron of English
whalers, which she had made prize. Hunt tried to buy
one of these, but Porter asked him the outrageous price
of $25,000 — ^why I cannot say, unless there was a preju-
dice in the Navy against Astor because of his wealth and
unwillingness to venture capital in privateering. Then,
too, men of affairs were informed of the fur trader’s
partiality for the Canadians, and the secret service he
maintained beyond the frontier. In the tense state of
public opinion, those who were his enemies were not above
hinting that news of Britain’s activities might be paid for
in similar coin. Whatever the reason. Porter was strangely
unwilling to assist the outpost on the Pacific, declining.

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE i8i

also, to send a naval detachment in one of the prizes to
bring off the American property and nationals at Astoria.

He did, though, spur Hunt’s determination by passing
on to him the information that the British frigate Phoebe,
the sloops-of-war Cherub and Raccoon and a store ship
mounted with heavy battering pieces had sailed from Rio
de Janeiro on July 6, their objective the mouth of the
Columbia. Hunt’s one desire, now, was to get to the
Sandwich Islands, and try for another vesselj but the
crew of the Albatross were not to be torn from their
joyance with the shapely, brown island beauties, and it
was November 23 before the anchor was raised, and the
voyage resumed. They reached “Owyhee” on December
20, finding there the shipwrecked crew of the Lark,
which had left New York the preceding March 6. Ener-
getic as ever, Hunt bought the best available craft in the
vicinity, the Pedle}' brig, for $10,000, a sum little less
outrageous than that asked by Captain Porter for his
whaler, shipped the LarlPs crew in her, and by January
22, 1814, was at sea again, bound for Astoria.

However blundering Hunt may have been in the past,
no criticism can be leveled at his energetic efforts during
these hectic months of 1813, but he was laboring against
an overwhelming concatenation of events. On October 7,
McTavish had returned to Astoria with a brigade of
seventy-five men. They hoisted the British ensign above
their encampment under the walls of the fort, and to the
disgust of the few Americans in the garrison, McDougal
forbade the raising of the Stars and Stripes in defiance
of this covert threat. McTavish likewise delivered to
McDougal a letter from his, McDougal’s, uncle, Angus
Shaw, a principal partner of the Northwest Company,
warning him of the approach of the British squadron
instructed “to take and destroy everythmg American on
the Northwest Coast.” This letter, or parts of it, which
would suit his purpose, McDougal read to his assenibled
derks, with gloating emphasis upon the dangers indi-

1 82 JOHN JACOB AST OR

cated. And later in the same day he entertained from
McTavish a proposition that the Northwest Company
should take over the entire stock of goods and peltry of
the Pacific Fur Company.

This proposition, after some haggling back and forth,
to the advantage of the Northwest Company, was em-
bodied in a definite agreement on October 1 6, under the
terms of which less than $40,000 was allowed for furs
worth in excess of $100,000. It should be considered,
in this connection, that the right conceded by Hunt to
McDougal to negotiate singly an arrangement with
McTavish was contingent upon Hunt’s failure to return
by January i, 1814, a date two and a half months dis-
tant, Further, that the seventy-five Northwest men were
confronted by sixty Pacific Fur Company men, protected
by the fort and its cannon, while the Northwest brigade
were too short of ammunition to fight. As against this,
of course, should be arraigned the twin facts that
McDougal co\ild claim the probable imminence of the
British naval squadron, and the frankly disloyal char-
acter of a majority of the fort’s garrison — ^including him-
self! Most of the Astorians wanted to see the post change
hands. But nevertheless, business honesty would have
dictated the dispersal of the invaders, and the removal
of the stores and peltry to one of the interior posts, out
of reach of the guns of the men-o’-war. It is unthinkable
that an American of any fighting spirit, had he been in
charge, would have permitted so miserable a settlement.

McDougal afterwards claimed, and was supported by
McTavish, that originally he had proposed the furs be
shipped to Canton and sold there for Astor’s accovmt,
but that these terms were rejected by the Northwest
Company. Well, he made damned littie efiFort to enforce
his suggestion. Having salved in this manner such con-
science as he possessed, he proceeded to agree to a further
reduction in the terms of the counter-offer of the North-

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 183

west menj and for price for his serv'ices they gave him
in secret on December 23, a certificate of partnership in
their company. So he, who had left the Northwest Com-
pany to assist Astor’s competition, resumed his first
allegiance under circumstances which confirmed the sus-
picions his policies had aroused from the initiation of the
venture. A tortuous, scheming knave, of the same false
texture as those dark chiefs like Simon Fraser, who
played both sides in the ’45, and were the curse of every
other phase of Scottish history.

Several weeks subsequent to this he and his fellow-
plotters had a severe fright. A sail was sighted doubling
Cape Disappointment on November 30, and how sure the
Northwest men were of British naval assistance is indi-
cated by the fact that McTavish loaded two barges TOth
the furs he had purchased, and hastened to ferry them
out of reach of landing parties, while McDougal put
off in a canoe, instructing his paddlers to be either English
or American as the needs of the moment might warrant.
However, their fears were speedily assuaged. The stran-
ger was the Raccoon sloop-of-war, twenty-six guns. Cap-
tain Black, of the British squadron, and in her company
was John McDonald, still another of the ubiquitous
partners of the Northwest Company. Mr. McDonald had
diverted the Raccoon^s officers with tales of the prize-
money they should obtain from the furs in the magazines
of Astoria, and they were all vasdy indignant to_be
appraised that the contents of the post had passed into
the hands of British subjects. Captain Black was equally
annoyed over the exaggerated accounts of the strength
of the fortifications furnished him by the Northwest
Company — ^‘‘Is this the fort about which I have heard
so much talking?” he exclaimed. “Damme, I could batter
it down in two hoiurs with a four-pounder.”

On December i2, Black formally raised the British
flag over the post, and took possession of it in the name

1 84 JOHN JACOB AST OR

of his King. Having done so, he departed to seet the
Raccoon^ s sister ships, the Rhoebe and Che}'uhy them-
selves seeking the Essexy which was wrecking British
commerce in the South Seasj and the Northwest Com-
pany men assumed control of Astoria, although McDougal
was left imdisturbed as Astor’s representative, and held
all the Pacific Fur Company’s papers and records, and
the drafts drawn by McTavish and his associates in pay-
ment for the furs and goods. McKenzie, Clarke and
David Stuart returned down-river about this time, defi-
nitely discouraged by the success which had attended
McDougal’s intrigues. You will note I include McKenzie
with the other partners, for at this stage he cast in his
lot with them. McDougal had used him, I take it, and
when he was no longer necessary, cast him aside. They
were all three for returning to the United States, but to
start in the depth of winter would have been folly. So
they settled down for what must have been a very dreary
Christmas, and nothing more eventful happened until
another ship was sighted ofiF the bar on February 28, 1814,
and the Pedler wore in to the anchorage.

Hunt came ashore to learn of the absolute destruction
of his hope to salvage something from the wreckage of
the enterprise, and if he was not a man of violent temper,
still, he was pointed in his comments to McDougal —
not that it did him any good. Even his indignation, after
he discovered that the Scot had been a secret partner of
the Northwest Company for two months, and represent-
ing Astor simultaneously, had no result beyond irnpelling
McDougal the more quickly to yield up the papers and
drafts which belonged to the defunct Pacific Fur Com-
pany. Poor Htmt swallowed his wrath as best he could,
and addressed himself with the celerity he always
achieved in adversity to winding up the sorry mess. The
Americans and those other employes who preferred not
to take service with the Northwest Company were em-

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 185

barked on the Pedler or mustered into a small brigade,
led by Clarke, McKenzie, and Stuart, to return overland.

The Pedler sailed April 3, and toucbed at Kamchatka
to apprize the Russians of the turn in affairs and land
Russell Farnham, one of the American clerks, who trav-
eled across Siberia and Europe with dispatches for Astor,
reaching New York well in advance of his comrades,
whose voyage was prolonged and storm-tossed. The
overland brigade left Astoria on April 4, and suffered
the usual mishaps which had befallen the several parties
that had traveled this route, already becoming a beaten
path. One of their adventures deserves notice because it
furnishes our last glimpse of the most singular individual
concerned in these journeyings. Near the mouth of the
Wallah-Wallah they were hailed in French from the
shore, and in a canoe which put out to them were amazed
to recognize Dorion’s squaw and her children, sole sur-
vivors of an expedition sent to the Snake River the
preceding summer. Of the men, all except one had been
surprised and killed by the Indians in a simultaneous
series of onfalls. A single voyageur, severely wounded,
had escaped to tell the woman of the death of Dorion
and the others. And she, undismayed, had shouldered
the wounded man upon a horse, mounted her children
upon a second beast, and hiding and fleeing by turns,
contrived to gain a place of refuge in the mountains. The
wotmded man was unable to support the hardships of
flight, but by incredible efforts she kept her children alive
until she obtained the hospitality of the Wallah-Wallah
tribe. Now, as imperturbable as ever, she rejoined the
brigade, and placidly shared the toils and dangers of the
long journey eastward, up the defiles of the Columbia
and the Snake, over the jagged summits of the Rockies
and across the burning expanse of the prairies to the
lower Missouri.

A great character. She flits across the pages of history

i86 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

with a strangely compelling effect of individuality, the
most dependable person of those who went to Astoria.
Whenever she had a job to do, she did it. Two children
she took out with her — and two she brought back. She
had a life to bring forth, under as dreadful conditions as
a woman might experience — ^and she brought it forth. No
fault of hers that new life flickered and died. As for
Dorion’s death, had he been with her when the war-
whoop sounded, I make no doubt she would have saved
him, as she did herself and the children and the wounded
man, who died finally from sheer weariness and loss
of blood.

But what did she think of it all? What did it signify
to her? If we only knew!

Many a month should pass before Astor knew Astoria
was lost to hirn, and during those months he’d recon-
struct his financial and mercantile program, swinging his
activities from a war to a peace basis j but none-the-less the
blow was stinging to his pride, and he swore an unending
vendetta against the Northwest Company — ^^^after their
treatment of me, I have no idea of remaining quiet and
idle,” he wrote to Hunt. He took steps, by the interest of
his friends at Washington, to induce the Government
to reassert possession of the Columbia River territory,
in accordance with the terms of the Treaty of Ghent
guaranteeing the status quo ante helium; and the Ontario
sloop-of-war. Captain Biddle, was duly ordered around
the Horn to execute a formal cancellation of the cere-
mony by means of which Captain Black of the Raccoon
had laid claim to the territory. Furthermore, as he
thought, to clinch the matter, he had a law passed by
Congress, forbidding British traders to operate within
the dominions claimed by the United States.

But it wasn’t as simple as all that. The Northwest

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 187

Company had established itself securely in Oregon; As-
toria, over which its flag flew, •w'as now Fort George, and
its brigades ranged at will from the Coast to the Rockiesj
Concomly, the one-eyed chief of the Chinooks and father-
in-law of McDougal, like the other red potentates of
this area, had easily switched allegiance to the organiza-
tion in power. Captain Biddle, a dozen Captain Biddles,
might fire a salute to the flag of the United States, and
brandish his sword and recite whatever legalistic formula
his superiors had devised for him; but unless he and his
bluejackets were prepared to disembark and devote them-
selves to the unfamiliar warfare of mountains and forests
they could not expect to displace the alert Canadians.
And the Administration in Washington, mighty glad to
have gotten out of the recent war so easily, was in no
mood to bring about a resumption of hostilities, especially
when the stake was so remote as the fur trade of a
country separated by two thousand miles from the nearest
permanent settlements. There was, indeed, a general in-
clination after the war to belittle the importance of the
regions beyond the Rockies — ^the country had been badly
frightened, and was in a mood to realize the immediate
difiiculty of colonizing the hundreds of thousands of miles
of unoccupied territories adjacent to the Mississippi val-
ley. It is to Astor^s credit that he never yielded to this
laissez faire conception of the public interest. When
Albert Gallatin returned with the other Peace Commis-
sioners from Europe in the Fall of 1815, Astor met him
in Washington, and offered a qualified congratulation on
the Treaty he had helped to negotiate.

"I’m very much pleased with what you gentlemen have
accomplished,” said the merchant, “but there are some
things you ought not to have left imdone, Mr. Gallatin.”

“What things, Mr. Astor?” countered Gallatin.

“You should have settled more definitely the question
of the Columbia territory.”

“Never mind,” Gallatin answered laughingly. “It will

1 88 JOHN JACOB AST OR

be time enough for our great-grandchildren to talk about
that in two hundred years.”

Astor shook his head.

“If w'e live, Mr. Gallatin, we shall see trouble about
it in less than forty years,” he predicted.^

Gallatin was an unusually broad-minded man, a true
statesman, a great financier — ^and his view was the view
of the best intellects in America. It says much for this
blundering, VTong-headed German merchant of ours that
he was right where so many, who possessed more genuine
vision than he, who were more essentially patriotic, were
wrong. From the very conclusion of the War of 1812
the ownership of the Northwestern coast and the country
inland to the Rockies was a subject of controversy between
the United States and Great Britain. Astor, undiscouraged
by the news of the Northwest Company’s success, be-
sought the Administration to send out a military force
to retake Astoria and hold it. A single company would be
sufficient, he declared. But President Madison continued
loath to assume the responsibility for a step which might
precipitate bloodshed. Astor, himself, considered the alter-
native of private warfare: sending a strong brigade to
compete with the Northwest Company along the Colum-
bia. There were plenty of rough condottieri on the fron-
tier, who would have volunteered for such an expedition.
But the idea of violence was repugnant to an orderly,
German soul.

Despite the unwillingness of the Americans to go to
extremes, there was a gradual, persistent growth of senti-
ment in favor of a stronger stand over our rights to the
Northwest coast; and in 1818 this resulted in an agree-
ment between the two nations providing for joint occu-
pation for a period of ten years, which, so far as it removed
the danger of hostilities and soothed American pride, was

Aster’s grandson, Charles Astor Bristed, is authority for this anecdote
in Hs ^‘Open Letter to Horace Mann.’^

AN APOSTLE OF EMPIRE 189

entirely satisfactory. It did not, however, serve in the
slightest degree to mitigate the dominance of the North-
west Company on the Columbia, and, generally, west of
the Rockies. Only by a prolonged and arduous campaign
should the American fur traders be able eventually to
efFect a partial restoration of the American title to coun-
tries which were discovered and explored by American
enterprise. But the day of this restoration was to come.
The Treaty of 1818, renewed for two similar periods of
ten years each, resulted finally in a compromise of the
mutual claims of Great Britain and the United States,
and Astor lived to see the flag of his adopted country
definitely displayed over Astoria.

He is reported to have been pathetically pleased by
this realization, in extreme old age, of the dream which
had animated his prime. For the failure of his essay as
empire-builder was always aching in his memory. But
much as he felt his failure, and regretted it, he never
understood it. Rather, he blamed it upon Hunt for having
allowed the Beaver to sail for Canton from Alaska, with-
out stopping at Astoria, or upon Captain Sowle for keep-
ing the Beaver at Canton instead of returning to the
mouth of the Columbia, or upon nature for the shipwreck
of the Lark, or upon the Administration for not having
come to his aid. No blame, he reckoned, attached to him-
self. In all his pleasure over the Oregon Treaty, which
President Polk unwillingly signed at the behest of the
Senate, there was no room for apprehension that but for
his mistakes of judgment the line of demarcation would
have been much nearer the “Fifty-four, forty” of the
militant faction, who alliterated with the figures the
phrase “or Fight,” than the Forty-ninth Parallel of
latitude, which the United States was obliged to accept.
Yet it wouldn’t be fair to censure him too harshly. He
wrought his best, according to his lights j he lost $800,000,
without whimpering, a sum in excess of the fortunes of

190 JOHN JACOB AST OR

ail except perhaps a score of individual Americans in
iSi5j nobody else saw the vision he glimpsed, however
imperfecdy, and nobody else was willing to undertake
the job after he failed at it. But for his blind, stumbling
effort our frontier north of California might conceivably
have terminated at the line of the Rockies.

BOOK FIVE

THE FIRST TRUST

Like most phlegmatic persons, Astor refused to waste
vain regrets over a dream gone wrong. He put Astoria
behind him, and addressed himself to reconstituting his
fur trade in the Great Lakes region so soon as the menace
of redcoat and redskin was removed. But there vras more
than a hint of malice in the energy with which he went
about the task of convincing the Administration that alien
traders should be barred from the territory of the United
States. One of the three or four richest men in the coun-
try, and a director of the Bank of the United States,
recently established, his wishes were not to be ignored}
and Congress readily enacted legislation which put the
mighty Nor’west Company at his mercy. In 1816 he
bought up his rivals’ posts below the Lakes and on the
upper Mississippi on his own terms. The first step he
had projected in incorporating the American Fur Com-
pany was accomplished. The entire fur trade east of
the Mississippi was in his control, and he reorganized his
parent corporation, doubling its capital to $1,000,000, in
order to exploit efficiently the additional facilities he
had acquired.

Nobody knew it at the time — Astor himself, had no ap-
preciation of the significance of the campaign he was about
to launch; but there was being born, in embryo, a fore-
shadowing of those gigantic consolidations of industry
which should dominate the nation’s activities eighty years
later, and remodel the entire fabric of American business.
More than that. In the dexterity with which he linked fuir
with shipping, and shipping with tea, and tea again with
fur, we may glimpse a conception of the p3T:amidal trust,
which the German Stinnes brought to full fruition in the

193

194 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

tumultuous period following the World War. On a mini-
ature scale, to be sure. So small as to seem almost ridicu-
lous, in light of modern values. Yet the central idea was
the same: an interlinking of dependent businesses, under
a single control, so as to wring from each a maximum of
profits.

And as it happened — ^through no conscious policy of
his — Astor’s campaign was to produce political results out
of all proportion to its economic consequences. Astoria and
the Pacific Fur Company had, at best, an indirect influ-
ence upon subsequent events. But the American Fur Com-
pany and the antagonists it spurred to even greater eflForts
were positive, vital forces in exploring and colonizing the
Far West. They furnished the driving power which made
practicable the visions of those few American statesmen
who saw the Republic expanding from ocean to ocean,
although it is but just to add that their interest primarily
was neither beneficent nor unselfish. Undoubtedly, too, if
there had never been an American Fur Company or an
Astor to conceive it, some other company, conceived by
some other intelligent merchant, would have performed
the same functions and reaped identical rewards. Fate
happened to select Astor.

What a contrast we have here! The stolid, prosaic mer-
chant, sitting in his office in New York, speaking broken
English, unable to think as an American, but equipped
with a mind instinctively grasping the commercial advan-
tages involved — and thousands of miles away, in the for-
ests and the mountains, and remote on the headwaters of
lonely rivers, the rough, fur-clad frontiersmen, who
wrought his will, and whose adventurings at his behest
made known the heart of a continent to eager hordes will-
ing to outface any hardship or travel any distance if there
was free arable land at the end of the journey. And none
of them realized what they were doing! Driven on by
love of gain or adventure, they all alike labored furiously
for the immediate stake, never recking they were the

THE FIRST TRUST 195

spearhead of that host of farmers and mechanics, whose
very presence would ruin the trade which was their main-
stay, never recking that where they built their log trading
posts, and in the mountain valleys where they held their
rendezvous, and on the site of the Indian villages where
they bought their squaws, should arise a hundred cities
larger than the New York or Philadelphia of their day.

It was always so from the moment the earliest settlers
shoved off from the first villages on the Adantic coast.
The trapper wandered up the river valleys into the foot-
hills of the Appalachians. Returning with his catch of
peltry, he told the stay-at-homes of the wonders he had
seen, and the discontented or venturous amongst the local
farmers tracked him to the nearest cove that had no land-
lord. Others followed, younger sons who must look to
themselves for support, sturdy immigrants from over-
seas, short of capital but long of muscle and determination.
And with them the frontier pushed westward, following
the courses of the navigable rivers until the falls or
rapids were reached at the point where the upland trend
steepened. Here there’d be a pause, while the pioneers
cleared the territory occupied and gathered their energies
anew. But in a few years the zone of occupation widened
— late comers, finding the choice river bottoms staked out,
would branch right and left into the contiguous country
paralleling the limit of navigation. Another pause — ^and
the push would be westward once more. The trappers,
the fur traders — indefatigable precursors of civilization
— ^had entered the foothills, and reported the sheltered
valleys and lofty benches along the eastern rim of the
mountains. And a third generation of adventurers, bent
upon securing farms for raising families, would climb out
of the lowlands to the skirts of the hills that loomed mys-
teriously blue in the western sky.

The eve of the Revolution witnessed the definite pas-
sage of the Appalachians. The trapper was driven west-
ward still, on the heels of the Indians, who resented

196 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

blindly this, to them, cruel seizure of lands which had
been theirs for centuries. Indeed, had the trappers been
philosophers instead of men of action, ignorant, bigoted,
narrowly set upon the one means of livelihood apparent
to them, they must have perceived that their true inter-
ests chimed closer with the Indians than with the farmers
who crowded after them. Any country once resigned to
farming ceased to be a good prospect for peltry. The
Hudson’s Bay Company, the most intelligently selfish
corporation which ever operated on this continent, had no
illusions on this score. It was invariably opposed to farm-
ing, and subtly worked to make the intrusion of the farmer
upon the countries covered by its posts as uncomfortable
as unprofitable. But no American fur company — I use the
term generically, you understand, not with application
to Astor’s organization — ^was either sufficiently intelligent
or selfish ever to discern the historic parallel. Perhaps it
would have been impossible for the American companies
to check the westward drift of population, in any event.
This phenomenon had continued for well over a hundred
years when Astor became a figure of importance in the
fur trade, and its greatest demonstration was yet to come.
But speculation Is idle. The fact is apparent in every phase
of the frontier. The trapper blazed the way. Behind him
marched the farmer and mechanic, their offspring poised
atop of the meager belongings jammed into some second-
hand cart or perched precariously upon broken-winded
pack-ponies.

Jacob Astor, himself, had seen the flood pour west from
the valley of the Mohawk below the Lakes, sweeping aside
the remnants of the Iroquois with whom he had traded
on his youthful travels. He had seen the Ohio valley
definitely occupied, and the two streams of white emigra-
tion gradually coalesce to dominate the whole area be-
tween the Lakes and the river. And men working for him
had led the continuing westward sweep that reached the
Mississippi, shortly after the Louisiana Purchase, and tar-

THE FIRST TRUST 197

ried there to bide the issue of the War. Now, with the
conclusion of peace, hard times were general in the East,
and restless citizens turned their backs upon known pov-
erty to dare unknown dangers, crowding thicker and faster
into the Northwest, creeping in steadily increasing num-
bers up the lower Missouri, observing next the traditional
custom of spreading right and left along that river’s tribu-
taries, as the more convenient tracts were settled. In front
of them drifted the trapper, sullen as the Indians who re-
treated with him, compelled again to find new beaver
grounds.

There was no instantaneous transition, to be sure. It
was a matter of years. But the logic of events was inexor-
able. Astor, conning the situation in his simply furnished
office — recently moved from Pine to Vesey Street, where
it was conveniently adjacent to his house at 223 Broadway
— could tick the facts on his stubby fingers: first, the nearer
tribes were cowed j second, the British pretense to inter-
ference with American trade was terminated} third, the
destruction of the Northwest Company’s American busi-
ness left him no serious rival in the region of the Lakes;
fourth, emigration would be stimulated anew; fifth, this
meant that even if the wilder covintry bordering the Lakes
continued to produce fur he must be prepared to replace
areas which would attract settlers; sixth, he knew from
the reports of the Astorians that there were innumerable
beaver streams, scarcely tapped, accessible from the upper
Missouri. He must expand his activities, then. But he
had just had his fingers burnt, and despite his phlegm,
they hurt. He wouldn’t move too hastily. For one thing,
the Government of the United States, in a spirit of mis-
guided paternalism, was in business as a fur trader with
the Western tribes, and he was not inclined to imdertake
competition with so redoubtable an antagonist. No, no!
He’d wait and see what Gallatin and his other friends
could do with Congress. He had plenty to occupy him, in

198 JOHN JACOB AST OR

the meantime, reorganizing his acqidsitions from the
Northwest Company. Ah, he’d make dem fellers sweat!

A BAFFLING character, this Astor, capable at the same time
of simple, straightforward vision and stubborn stupidity.
You might think, for instance, that he would have learned
a lesson from his experiences in the Astoria venture, that
he would be disposed now to adopt a more nationalistic
attitude toward his business. Not at all! He was regarded
with open suspicion in the frontier districts, where his
involved relationships with Canadians — ^product of his
joint control with the Northwest Company of the South-
west Company — had placed him in a difficult position dur-
ing the recent war. Matthew Irwin, factor at the trading
post the United States Government operated at Green
Bay, Wisconsin, had complained to Thomas L. McKen-
ney, Superintendent of Indian Affairs at Washington, that
he obtained from Secretary Gallatin an order permitting
his people to transfer furs from the British post at St.
Joseph to Mackinac on the outbreak of hostilities. Also,
that Astor’s agent, who was a British subject, had carried
to the British garrison at Malden news that war would
be declared by Congress — of no slight importance, this
last item, since it was instrumental in the seizure by the
British of a sloop which carried the official papers and
baggage of unfortunate old General William Hull, com-
mander of the American troops on that frontier, and this,
in turn, led to the enemy movements which resulted in the
surrender of Hull’s entire force at Detroit, a pretty open-
ing act for an inglorious drama. Furthermore, this same
agent returned to Mackinac with a detail of British troops,
who promptly occupied the post in the name of the Prince
Regent.’^

To the frontier these occurrences looked very black.
“Old Astor” might subscribe to the War Loan and boast

^ Senate Document No. 6o, ist Session, 17 th Congress.

THE FIRST TRUST 199

the intimacy of all the prominent men from the President
down, but the frontier folk thought directly, with no eye
for the nuances of life, the infinite petty complications
which make it well nigh impossible to judge any man in
high place by the outward seeming of what he does. They
heard further loose talk from the free trappers of the
arrogant stand the American Fur Company assumed to-
ward those who rebelled against its schedule of trading
prices. There were rumors of gossip from the eastern sea-
port towns that “Astor ain’t no better’n a goddam’ Fed-
eralist— ’got a dozen ships, and ain’t sent a privateer to
sea.” Later, the frontier knew vaguely that he was getting
news underground from Canada — have referred to
this previously, and to the contemporary question whether
he didn’t pay for enemy news with like coin from New
York.

But, black as the indictment reads, there seems to be
no proof that Astor, himself, was in any way involved in
Canadian intrigues. He was merely the victim of his own
blind, insensate policy of operating with alien subordi-
nates because they were cheaper and more amenable to dis-
cipline than the rough-and-ready American trappers. He
procured the transfer of his furs from the former South-
west Company post at St. Joseph, in order to save his prop-
erty from seizure. The processes of his mind were such, in
this as in similar matters, that he ignored the probable re-
sults of intrusting the mission to a Canadian agent. And
it is likely that he was the loser by his stupidity, for his
furs would have been taken over by the British troops
that seized the Mackinac post. The truth appears to be
that he was as surprised by the disloyalty shown by his
Canadians in the Northwest Country as by the disloyalty
of their brethren at Astoria. Both cases left him puzzled,
sore, revengeful, and unconvinced that his fundamental
policy was wrong.

That is the amazing feature of the episode. The instant
he could take up operations again in the Lake country, he

200 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

resumed the policy of giving Canadians preference to
Americans. Brigades of trappers for his service were re-
cruited at Montreal, and at Mackinac, which became the
center of his trade on the Lakes, he stationed Ramsey
Crooks as General Agent, with Robert Stuart, the younger
of that ilk, as assistant. No cause for criticism attaches to
either of these individuals — Crooks seems to have become
a naturalized American citizen prior to his joining the
Astorians, and was too disgusted with McKenzie’s in-
trigues to remain on the Columbia, while Stuart, although
technically a British subject, had been faithful in carry-
ing overland in wartime the only full dispatches to reach
his employer from Astoria before the smash came. But
their ties had been with the Nor’west Company originally,
and they remained familiar with the Scotch-Canadian fac-
tors, clerks, and trappers of the posts above the Lakes.
They were not, in the eyes of the frontier West, true-
blue Americans: their appointments perpetuated the feel-
ing that Astor was against his adopted countiymen.

His first importations of aliens aroused the local authori-
ties of the Northwest to fury, and led to an attempt to
construe the law he had secured from Congress, prohibit-
ing foreign companies from trading in United States ter-
ritory as likewise applying to the employment of alien
subjects by American citizens. Colonel Talbot Chambers,
of the Rifle Regiment, holding the military command on
the Mississippi, seized two American Fur Company boats
on this ground; but Astor sued him, with Thomas H.
Benton, of Missouri — ^the future Senator and apostle of
western expansion — ^for counsel, and won a verdict of
$5,000 damages. Astor had the modern trust-builder’s
knack for picking the right men to work with — and there
is at least a slight shadow of evidence that he wasn’t above
employing certain of the more questionable methods
known to modern high finance. In 1909, certain old ledg-
ers of the American Fur Company were placed on ex-
hibition at the Anderson Galleries in New York City,

201

THE FIRST TRUST

prior to their sale at auction, and a curious investigator ^
discovered on one o£ the soiled, yellow pages an entry
recording the payment of $35,000 to Governor Lewis
Cass of Michigan Territory. The date was May 3, 1817,
and no services were recorded as compensation for a fee
which must have been considered exorbitant in that day 5
but it may not be without significance that about a year
before the date in question strenuous objections were be-
ing made to Governor Cass against Astor’s continued im-
portations of Canadian trappers — objections which Cass
ignored.^

Of course, the other fur companies and the host of free
trappers, did all that was possible to discredit the Ameri-
can Fur Company. Its misdeeds and shortcomings w'ere
exaggerated and enlarged upon at every opportunity, yet
with all due allowance for hostile propaganda there must
have been fire underneath so much smoke. We shall find
other grave charges registered against it in years to
come when its power and prestige were incomparably
greater, and it loomed before the country as the most
potent force for good or harm west of the Mississippi,
stronger in these regions than the Government of which
it was a creature. And I regret to say that these charges
were frequently true. It debauched and cheated the sav-
ages 5 it held in narrow bondage the miserable white men
who worked for it 5 it was ruthless toward all individuals
or corporations too weak to resist its might; it was coldly,
and occasionally stupidly, selfish in the policies it adopted;
and on the whole, it preferred to let its more adven-
turous rivals do the exploring for new beaver streams —
and then swallow them up, trust-fashion. For all of which
that strange, baffling, preposterous fellow, Astor, was di-
rectly or indirectly responsible. To the very last he blun-
dered clumsily along toward the goal he had set himself,

* “History of the Great American Fortunes” by Gustai-us Myers.

* “The History of the American Fur Trade of the Far West,” Vol.
p. 312, by Hiram M. Chittenden.

202 JOHN JACOB AST OR

stamping down wiser, more patriotic, better-informed
men. Nothmg could keep him from success.

During the years immediately following the War, as
I have said, Astor and the American Fur Company more
or less marked time. Business was very bad in the East,
the market for fur and tea was ofF, and he was not dis-
posed to enlarge his field of operations until the Govern-
ment withdrew its official trading posts in the Indian coun-
try. He lobbied persistently at Washington to accomplish
this objective, and was finally rewarded when Congress
in the winter of 1821-22 abolished the Government posts,
abandoning the entire fur trade to private enterprise. Wel(
might John Jacob lick his thin lips in anticipation over
this achievement. For a recent Liverpool packet had
brought word that the proud Nor’west Company had given
up the fight, too. Shorn of its trapping grovmds in the
United States, it had competed with the American Fur
Company at an increasing disadvantage, and was reluct-
antly compelled to assent to its absorption, through Act
of Parliament, by the Hudson’s Bay Company, its Cana-
dian rival.

All that stood, now, between the American Fur Com-
pany and dominion over the Far Western fur countries
were the free trappers and a handful of small trading
firms, which would have lacked the resources of the Trust
even had they been willing to forget their mutual jeal-
ousies and combine to form an opposition group. Astor
acted with celerity to develop his opportunity. To the ex-
isting headquarters of the company, Detroit and Macki-
nac, was added a third, St. Louis, destined to become the
most important of the three, and as a means to consoli-
dating his power on this newest frontier he was invading —
not for the first time, it is true, but with the first valid
intention of permanence — ^and to minimize competition,
he proceeded to absorb the St. Louis firm of Stone, Bost-

THE FIRST TRUST 203

wick & Company, an enterprising trading house, with valu-
able connections in the Indian country.

It was as if Destiny, moving with immutable precision,
deliberately had undertaken to clear his road for him. In
July, 1821, Parliament had retaliated upon the exclusion
of Canadian traders from American territory by exclud-
ing Americans from Canada. The American Fur Com-
pany, in consequence, had withdrawn from its few posts in
the region east of Lake Huron affected; but had countered
by establishing a new chain of three posts along the in-
ternational boundary, recently defined on the Forty-ninth
Parallel, between Lake Superior and the Lake of the
Woods. The Hudson’s Bay Company reluctantly evacu-
ated the post it had only just built at Pembina on the Red
River of the North, and Astor’s brigades found them-
selves strategically situated to exploit a wide range of fur-
bearing territory, with very little reason to be over-cau-
tious as to which side of a vague geographical line they
set their traps.

Detroit and Mackinac continued to be headquarters for
what was known as the Northern Department, with Crooks
and Stuart in charge, covering all the country contiguous
to the Lakes, including the three new posts; St. Louis
became the headquarters of the Western Department, in
charge of Pierre Chouteau, Jr., member of an old family
of Louisiana French extraction and one of the keenest
traders of the frontier. It is odd to note Chouteau’s selec-
tion for this, which was to be the most important subordi-
nate post in the American Company. He was a man after
Astor’s own heart, adroit, fearless, dominating — and of
alien extraction. Could it be possible that the German
emigrant lad disliked to have Americans of the old stock
in responsible positions under him?

From the first the American Fur Company encountered
fierce and efficient competition. The Missouri Fur Com-
pany, Manuel Lisa’s veteran organization, was constantly
building new posts on the upper river; and William Henry

204 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

Ashley, of St. Louis, first Lieutenant Governor of the in-
fant state of Missouri — admitted to the Union in the pre-
ceding year — ^was forming a partnership with Major An-
drew Henry, whose deserted fort on Henry’s Fork of
the Snake, used by the Astorians, you’ll recall, was the
earliest permanent American settlement beyond the Shin-
ing Moimtains. The Ashley-Henry Outfit, as they were
known, like the Missouri Fur Company, were forced far
afield by the entry of the American Fur Company into the
Missouri country. Their resources were trivial compared
with the capital Astor could produce from coffers filled
by the returns of his fur trade in the North and his fra-
grant cargoes from China. The one superiority they could
boast was their popularity with the free trappers, who,
from the beginning, resented the Trust and its tactics, and
threw in their lot with the independent companies. As
a result, the independents always reached new beaver
grounds first, and discovered every landmark of the West
in so doing.

It was exacdy because of this necessity for exploiting
untouched country that Ashley and Henry in their second
expedition of 1823 abandoned the headwaters of the
Missouri, where the Missouri Company was better
equipped to withstand the American Company, and after
a stern brush with the Arickaras — ^which produced one of
the earliest punitive expeditions sent by the Government
west of the Mississippi — pushed overland to the base of
the Shining Mountains, which they crossed by the South
Pass, the first such crossing recorded, although one of the
free trappers, Etienne Prevost, had discovered the pass
some years before. Beyond the mountains, in the rich
valley of. the Green, the brigade encomitered beaver
streams which were to yield the chief of the enterprise a
snug fortune in the next four years, and presently draw
after him a swarm of lesser traders, unable to exist within
the spheres of the American and the Missouri Companies.

So, almost at the start of his efforts in the West, Astor

THE FIRST TRUST 205

was driving other men to endeavors more glorious, if
less profitable, than his own. With the Ashley-Henry Out-
fit were a score of trappers who might more justly lay
claim to the title of “Pathfinder” than the insufiFerable
coxcomb, Fremont, who, a generation hence should build
his reputation upon the exploits they performed as casual
episodes in their daily lives — such men as the Sublettes,
Milton and Bill} Jed Smith, “the knight in buckskin,”
earliest American to break the overland trail to Cali-
fornia j Jim Beckwourth, French mulatto and discoverer
of Beckwourth’s Pass in the High Sierrasj Jim Bridger,
discoverer of the Great Salt Lake and second after Coul-
ter into Yellowstone Park, who could paint on a smooth
hide a better map than most trained geographers} Tom
Fitzpatrick, ‘^Bad Hand” to the Blackfeet, one of the
deadliest Indian fighters in Western lore.

By 1823 the last of the wandering Nor’west Company
or Hudson’s Bay brigades had cleared out of the isolated
corners of the upper Missouri country} the West of the
Louisiana Purchase, from the Mississippi to the moim-
tains, was American, in fact as well as in name. But west
of the mountains the situation was quite different — a di-
rect result of Astor’s bungling of his Astoria enterprise.
In the vast region described as Oregon, the Hudson’s Bay
Company had supplanted the Nor’west Company, adding
the power of limitless capital to the vigor and initiative of
the rugged Scots who had snatched this prize from Astor’s
grasp. As you know, the tentative agreement reached with
Great Britain in the Treaty of 1818 provided for joint
occupation of the area, but joint occupation for many
years to come proved an empty phrase. The Nor’west
Company, and its successor, the Hudson’s Bay, had es-
tablished an authority so ateolute, had bound the tribes
by ties so rigid, that American competition in the fur
country west of the mountains was unpractical.

An old precedent was illustrated afresh} once the Hud-
son’s Bay Company was definitely established in a terri-

ao6 JOHN JACOB AST OR

tory from which it could not be ousted by political means,
no other fur company might hope to meet it on equal
terms. It maintained an iron discipline, where even the
American Fur Company at best achieved a pretense to sub-
ordination j it was scrupulously fair and just in its dealings
with the Indians, observing a single scale of prices, in ac-
cordance with seasonal conditions, where Astor’s, and every
other American, company manipulated prices at will to suit
occasional needs j it trapped scientifically, never overtaxing
any given area, reducing the annual take promptly at the
discovery of a falling-off in yield j and courteously, coldly,
with unswerving arrogance, it resisted every attempt
to invade territories covered by its organization. So long
as it had the power, it made conditions sufficiently uncom-
fortable to discourage an imduly lengthy visit. Through-
out the period of the fur trade’s prosperity. Aster’s com-
pany and lesser American rivals never seriously threatened
the supremacy of the Hudson’s Bay Company in Oregon.
It was the flood of settlers, following the trails the trap-
pers had opened across the South Pass and the Bad Lands
of the Snake Basin, who swamped the Hudson’s Bay Com-
pany exactly as similar floods of home-makers had rolled
over every fur area which became sufficiently well known
between the oceans.

The first step of the Hudson’s Bay Company was to
remove its Oregon headquarters from Fort George, old
Astoria, to a site sixty miles upstream, safe from any pos-
sible naval attack, an indication, by itself, that the Com-
pany anticipated ultimate ownership by Britain. At the
junction of the Snake and the Columbia it likewise
strengthened Fort Walla Walla, substantially on the site
of the post David Stuart had established during the cam-
paign of the Astorians. With these two posts it definitely
controlled the trade of the Columbia Basin, and as the
American free trappers and the brigades of the Missouri
Fur Company and the Ashley-Henry Outfit plodded into
the foothills of the Divide, it gradually extended its zone

THE FIRST TRUST 207

of power until it might be said to rule eastward to the
headwaters of the Snake. To shake loose its clutch upon
the western side of the Rockies required the united efforts
of all the American fur companies, and it is by no means
certain how permanent this scant measure of success would
have been but for the initiation of the Oregon migra-
tion of the Splendid Forties.

From the upper Missouri southward to the Arkansas,
bounding the Spanish provinces of Texas and New Mex-
ico, was the enormous expanse, mosdy rolling prairies,
the earlier explorers dubbed “The Great American Des-
ert,” home of wandering Indian tribes, savage Ishmael-
ites, whose hands were raised against one another, if, by
chance, there was no war-pipe to smoke against the white
men. Here Sioux, Cheyenne, Blackfeet, Pawnee, Arapaho,
Arickara, Apache, and a score of less numerous tribes rode
and fought, stole and scalped and tortured, in a fantastic
continuation of the Stone Age. Thousands of wild barbar-
ians, more thousands, probably, than we can realize today,
lived this life so irreconcilable with the civilization which
was crowding westward on the heels of the trappers, who,
in the beginning were regarded by the redskins with tol-
erance, but soon were assailed as unconscionable oppressors,
advance-guard of the land-hungry settlers, thieves, de-
bauchers of women, dread carriers of pestilence which
destroyed not villages, but nations.

Empty, this country, save for nomadic clusters of skin
tents, each with its attendant horse herds, and the shifting
columns of buffalo and antelope, beasts which served the
plains Indians for beef cattle, and would be so serving
the white man today had his ancestors been masters of
their own lust to kill for impermanent gain. The trapper
who traversed these billowing seas of grassland and sage-
brush hillocks moved warily, with an eye upon the hori-
zon whenever he topped a swell in the monotonous cham-
pagne. At any moment a squadron of skin-clad riders,
brandishing lance and bow, might gallop over the nearest

208 JOHN JACOB AST OR

elevation, their whooping voices as hideous as their
painted, scarified features. Not much chance for the fugi-
tive in such a race. In all those hundreds of thousands of
square miles not a refuge, unless he chanced to run into
a band that hated his pursuers enough to go to the trouble
of plucking a white man from them.

Six hundred miles up the Arkansas, Major Stephen H.
Long, of the Seventh Infantry, U. S. A,, after whom
Long’s Peak was named, had established Fort Smith in
1817} but the handful of troops who occupied the post
existed almost on sufferance. Except for the Missouri Fur
Company’s slenderly garrisoned trading-posts on the
upper Missouri, and the posts the American Fur Company
was establishing to cover them, there wasn’t another
permanent American post, civil or military, west of the
Missouri frontier. Fort Atkinson, at Council Bluffs, on
the east bank of the Missouri River above the Platte, and
Fort Snelling, at the junction of the St. Peter’s with the
Mississippi (where St. Paul and Minneapolis lift their
skyscrapers), were the two other advanced posts of the
Army’s frontier chain, which roughly outlined the sup-
posed limits of civilized occupancy. West of this barrier
all was “Indian Country,” and only one attempt to bridge
it was to be made for a generation to come.

On June lO, 1821, the Missouri Intelligencer^ of Frank-
lin, Missouri — ^which was the frontier metropolis of the
state until the Missouri River washed it out of existence
in 1827 — carried an advertisement by Captain William
Becknell asking for “seventy men to go westward.” There
was a sufficient response, and a meeting of the volunteers
was held at the home of Ezekiel Williams, who had made
several trips to the Spanish settlements around Santa Fe,
in New Mexico, beginning in 1813. A pack-train was or-
ganized, and led by Becknell, reached Santa Fe that Fall,
and returned to Franklin in January, 1822. In the Spring,
BeckneU led a second expedition overland, this timp with
three wagons, and broke a shorter trail than Williams had

THE FIRST TRUST 209

described across the fearsome wastes of the Cimarron, des-
ert. This was the Santa Fe Trail, soon to be famous in
song and story, over which should travel Kit Carson as a
lad, and hundreds of other sturdy adventurers, who’d
make of the sleepy Indian pueblo of Taos a citadel of
the free trappers, and with it for base, open up the prolific
fur area of the Southwest, enabling the opponents of the
Trust to stretch out their hopeless battle a decade longer
than would otherwise have been the case.

The battle for the fur trade was on. Astor, alone — but
no, not alone — ^for his son, William, was home from Got-
tingen, striving dutiously to forget the ambition to be a
writer and philosopher which had animated a studious
youth, and for reward might see the style of the family’s
parent firm changed from ‘‘John Jacob Astor” to “Astor
& Son.” As baffling a figure as his father, this son. Jacob
was your thorough-going German, deeply impressed with
the value of learning, determined that William should
enjoy all the advantages poverty had denied himself.
Hence Columbia College, and Gottingen, where Schopen-
hauer was a fellow-student and intimate of the boy, and
the great Chevalier de Bunsen was especially retained to
be tutor and bear-leader. Lusty influences for intellectual
development, but not calculated to stimulate a sponta-
neous interest in the trade-price of beaver or the best
quality of Yankee gimcracks for the Canton market.

It seems probable that Jacob’s praiseworthy effort to
make a scholar out of William resulted not altogether
happily for the son. There was a twist, a warp, somewhere
in a character which was negative rather than positive, yet
was governed by a mind of notable strength. The picture
William’s contemporaries have left us is of a tall, heavily-
built man, with small, squinty eyes, a vacuous look and
a sluggish expression. He is represented as cold in de-
meanor, with an air which was generally abstracted. He

210 JOHN JACOB AST OR

early acquired a marked stoop, and was inclined to be
slovenly in his dress, unsocial and taciturn. That genial
raconteur, Philip Hone, who manages to sketch in a com-
prehensible impression o£ almost every prominent New
Yorker met in his long and busy life, contents himself
each time he has dined in William’s company with noting
the bare: “Dined with So-and-so. Among the company
Mr. and Mrs. William B. Astor, etc., etc.”

William, however, shared two of the elder Astor’s most
conspicuous traits: he was distinctively unemotional and
acquisitive. He had, too, a positive genius for details, and
with a plodding thoroughness soon mastered all the rami-
fications of what was very likely the most extensive busi-
ness of the time in this country. Socially, his position was
as high as anyone could have wished, his wife a lovely
and distinguished woman. His children he had just cause
to be proud of. His father was more than generous with
him, loved him devotedly, admired him, advanced him at
every opportunity. In the end he succeeded to the title of
“richest man in America,” and on a greater scale than
Jacob, at that. But he was never really happy. For all
his life he nursed a secret resentment j all his life he
scribbled secretly, and secretly wished he might cast aside
the crushing tasks business placed upon him to taste the
zest of authorship.^

Instead he bent his back to the burdens his father en-
trusted to him, burdens enough, in all conscience. He
wasn’t thirty when the titanic struggle for dominance of
the trans-Mississippi West commenced} and before the
struggle was definitely won he was in command of the
Astor campaign. It was, as I started to say above, a battle
between the Astors and a score of independent, squabbling
firms and individual traders of varying fortunes and abil-
ity— a battle between what passed for “Big Business” in

’it is amusing to observe that two of his descendants played at an-
thorship — ^the first Lord Astor and the namesake of the family’s founder
who perished in the Titanic disaster.

ld’s Richest Man Three-Quarters
■ENruRY Ago

Ill

THE FIRST TRUST

the third decade of the nineteenth century and the entire
frontier West, outside the ranks of the American Fur
Company’s employees. The spirit on both sides was bitter
and partisan in the extreme. Subordinates, if not their
overlords, were ready to go to any lengths, including mur-
der. Indian tribes were suborned by both sides to attack
rivals. And there is a strangely familiar note to students
of the modern trust era in phrases iterated and reiterated
in Chouteau’s correspondence with his Missouri French
lieutenants: ‘‘coute que coute,” ‘‘ecrasez toute opposition.”

Had the American Fur Company boasted a crest,
“ecrasez toute opposition” might well have served for
motto. The Trust knew but the one response to opposition
of any kind: beat it down, crush it or absorb it. And in an
age and a country where human conduct was tinctured by
familiarity with the brutalities of savage warfare, where
every man went armed, where gouging out eyes and
gnawing oflF ears were recognized as legitimate incidents
of personal combat and the average white man scalped
Indians as casually as Indians scalped whites, in such con-
ditions, I say, it is not to be wondered at that bullet and
scalping-knife supplemented rate-wars. Yet there were
certain rules roughly observed by the opposing sides in
this struggle. An independent brigade might, for instance,
bait the Blackfeet to set upon an American Fur Company
brigade, but let that independent brigade be within reach
of an American brigade that was undesignedly assailed by
redskins, and the free trappers would leap to assist men
they counted their enemies in less degree than the Indians
simply because their skins were the same color. By and
large, trappers of both factions preferred to keep the peace
with each other. The Indians usually were dragged in only
when the American Company brigades tried to penetrate
to beaver countries the free trappers had discovered.
Throughout this war which was not a war, in the strict
sense of the word, but which involved all the stratagems
and ambushes, the devices and assaults, both of business

212 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

and of war, a meetmg of opposing white parties was more
likely to bring about an evening of yarning around the
campfire, a swapping of brags and dares, than combat.
After all, the plains and the mountains were so incredibly
vast in area. It seemed in the beginning as though there
must be room for everyone to trap with profit.

But there wasn’t. The Trust made up for its ignorance
of the more remote regions by greater efficiency in opera-
tion. It built up a system of supplying the Indians with
whom it dealt with goods on credit, delivered in the au-
tumn before the hunting season opened, to be paid for later
with quantities of skins skilfully devised to more than com-
pensate for the accommodation. Trappers were accorded
similar terms. The system worked, of course, exactly like
the credit systems employed on large cotton plantations
in the South today or in the mining and industrial areas
where such reactionary and impolitic measures are still
tolerated. The Indians and the trappers were kept con-
tinually in debt to the company, and were obliged to pay
twice over for the credit they were always willing to
abuse. The trappers, who averaged $150 apiece for ten
months’ work, seldom complained. The sum was enough
to keep them i-unk and fed during the two months a year
they loafed at one of the rendezvous or some trading
post. Afterward, they’d secure credit, for a new outfit —
and sooner or later they’d “git sculped” or “squeezed”
by a grizzly or “tromped by a bufiPler herd” or “mebbe
bust a leg” and freeze to death in the mountings. Compara-
tively few ever knew old age like Jim Bridger. They were,
as a rule, social misfits, the abnormally adventurous froth
of the frontier, unwilling to settle down to farming or the
humdrum routine of family life with a white wife — Injun
squaws were too easy to buy or carry oflF, anyway, if a
feller craved him a woman.

So the injustices of the trading-post credit system sel-
dom did much harm to a trapper. But it was otherwise with
the Indians. No matter how wild they might be, they lived

THE FIRST TRUSZ 213

in family groups, and they rapidly became entirely de-
pendent upon the company for the necessities of existence.
They were scarcely more than serfs, bondmen of the post
factors. Of course, they could go away, and sometimes they
did, joining the roaming bands that refused to be tied down
to one locality. But the Indian was as human as the white
man. Plant a habit in him, and he found that habit diffi-
cult to break. It was an easy way of living for savages,
accustomed to reliance upon the quirks of nature, to have
a beneficent white man who could be relied upon to hand
out so many articles, so much powder and shot, in return
for a number of furs, even before the furs had been
trapped. And the Indian had no sense of self-control in
such unfamiliar circumstances. He’d drift along, doing as
little work as possible, depending upon the white man —
and when that didn’t ultimately mean starvation, it meant
slavery.

Witnesses appearing before a Senate Committee which
investigated in 1832 the effects of the fur trade upon
the tribes, testified that in 1829 the Winnebagoes, Sacs and
Foxes owed Astor’s agents $40,0005 two years later their
debts had swollen to nearly $60,000. Similar conditions
prevailed amongst the Pawnees, Cherokees, Chickasaws,
Sioux, and other tribes westward to the mountains. In
the same year the Senate Committee sat, Thomas For-
syth, an Indian agent, charged to Lewis Cass — ^to whom
Astor had paid $35,000 for unspecified services in 1817
when he was Governor of Michigan — ^now Secretary of
War, that the fur traders consistently used short weight
in dealing with the Indians. McKenney, the Superintend-
ent of Indian Affairs, who was a determined advocate of
his charges’ rights, told Senator Henry Johnson, Chair-
man of the Investigating Committee, that the only way
the traders could cheat the Indians was to make them
drunk.

Alcohol, indeed, was the -mckedest blight the fur trade
brought upon the savages, worse than smallpox and

214 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

venereal diseases even, which, at their worst, only ruined
the bodies of the red people. Alcohol killed the Indian’s
soul, making him a slave more surely than the easy credit
the post factors allowed. He was as unsalted to it as he
was to the white man’s diseases. It paralyzed every virtue
barbarism had inculcated in him, accentuated every vice
and lust he knew or could learn from the white trappers
who were only too willing to teach him. For a jug of it
many a brave would sell his squaw or daughter, and after
a few drinks, as McKenney told Senator Johnson, he cared
little how the post factor weighed his pelts so long as
they’d fetch him more “fire-water” — an apt name, for the
liquor the traders sold the Indians was generally pure
alcohol, diluted with plain river water as liberally as the
cheaters dared.

A sad, humiliating tale! It discredits Astor, it discredits
his son, it discredits their rivals, it discredits the American
people, who tolerated the situation, then legislated against
it, and afterward, in blithe American fashion, winked at
evasions as open as those which Prohibition has wished
upon the nation. Nor can the Hudson’s Bay Company,
usually more intelligent in Its policies than the American
traders, escape blame. In the beginning, the Canadian
Company refused to use liquor in any way to influence the
Indians, whose sobriety it considered an asset to business.
On the American side of the frontier, too, after the Gov-
ernment trading-posts were abandoned in 1822 the Intro-
duction of liquor was required to be confined to quantities
sufficient to satisfy the wants of the white employees of
the posts. But this law was a farce from the day it was
drawn. All that the traders had to do to evade it was to
pad the lists of their employees, and the tricks resorted to
by them were so apparent that the Government agents on
the frontier cannot be acquitted of responsibility. For ex-
ample, you find Bill Sublette, the free trapper, coolly
applying for whiskey for the “boatmen” who were to
transport his brigade across the Rocky Mountains to

THE FIRST TRUST Z15

Pierre’s Hole. And Astor’s subordinate at St. Louis,
Chouteau, shamelessly adding so many mouths to his ros-
ter of trappers as would have ruined the American Fur
Company to feed, rich as it was.

Then, in 1832, as a consequence of the Senate investi-
gation, Congress forbade altogether the transportation of
liquor into the Indian Comitry, and the Hudson’s Bay
Company, hoping to profit from the quandary in which
this placed the several American companies, reversed its
policy, and started to employ liquor as a bait to lure the
tribes to its posts in Oregon west of the mountains. A pity,
for had all the companies joined forces, and mutually en-
gaged to refrain from debauching the Indians it would
have made for conditions healthier for red men and white
men alike, for the fur trade and for the future develop-
ment of the West. But the Americans flouted the positive
Law of 1 832 as carelessly as they had its limited predeces-
sor. Carried in flat kegs, adjustable to pack-saddles and
readily concealed beneath wagon-loads of lawful goods,
alcohol remained a staple of the fur trade to the very last.
Rufus Sage detected twenty-four barrels in the wagons of
the caravan with which he crossed the Plains in 1 841 — ^it
was, he said, “put into the wagons, at Westport or Inde-
pendence in open daylight^ and taken into the (Indian)
territory in open daylight?*

The profits from alcohol were enormous, for the dilu-
tion was increased by the traders as the Indians became
more intoxicated. Four gallons of water to a gallon of
the raw spirits was considered an ideal mixture,’ and Jim
Beckwourth, the mulatto mountain man and scout, him-
self an honorary chief of the Crows, recounts in his some-
what apocryphal memoirs how upon one occasion he turned
six kegs into eighteen horses and l,ioo buffalo robes,
worth $6,000 — which was forty times the average trap-

“■It is evident that the aborigines were less hardy drinkers than the
modern American, whose formula for Prohibition gin requires a propor-
tion of forty per cent of alcohol..

ai6 JOHN JACOB AST OR

per’s annnal earnings. But this was an extreme case, and
in view of the tenor of Beckwourth’s narrative, may be
suspected of exaggeration. Andrew S. Hughes, writing
Secretary of War Cass from St. Louis, October 31, 1831,
charged that the American Fur Company had made $50,-
000 on alcohol in one year at its posts along the Missouri,
selling the stuff at the rate of$25to$50a gallon. Of the
company’s attitude he said; “They entertain, as I know to
be the fact, no sort of respect for our citizens, agents,
ofEcers or the Government, or its laws or general policy.”

Astor, to be sure, was so widely hated on the frontier,
where radicalism was gaining in strength from year to
year, that charges against him must be scanned closely for
bias. But notwithstanding all allowances it is permissible to
make, the evidence of the American Company’s guilt is
unescapable. Colonel Snelling, military commander at De-
troit, complained to James Barbour, Secretary of War,
August 23, 1825: “He who has the most whiskey gen-
erally carries off the most furs. ... The neighborhood
of the trading houses where whiskey is sold presents a
disgusting scene of drunkenness, debauchery and misery}
it is the fruitful source of all our difficulties, and of nearly
all the murders committed in the Indian Country. . . .
For the accommodation of my family I have taken a house
three miles from town, and in passing to and from it I
have daily opportunities of seeing the road strewn with the
bodies of men, women and children, in the last stages of
brutal intoxication. It is true there are laws in this terri-
tory to restrain the sale of liquor, but they are not
regarded.”

How familiar!

Colonel Snelling also charged that In that year, 1825,
there had been delivered, under contract, to the American
Fur Company’s agent at Mackinac, 3,300 gallons of whis-
key and 2,500 gallons of high wines. He concluded his
protest: “I will venture to add that an inquiry into the
manner in which the Indian trade is conducted, especially

Wide World Photos

The American Fur Company’s Trading Post at Mackinac. The Lower
View Shows the Fort-like Plan of the Building

THE FIRST TRUST 217

by the American Fur Company, is a matter of no small
importance to the tranquillity of the border,” ^

In the following year, McKenney, the Superintendent
of Indian Affairs whom I have quoted previously, re-
ported to the Secretary of War that General Tipton, the
Indian Agent at Fort Wayne, had seized a shipment of
whiskey, owned in part by the American Fur Company.
He remarked: ‘‘There are many honorable and high-
minded citizens in this trade, but expediency overcomes
their objections and reconciles them for the sake of the
profits of the trade.”

Even after the passage of the Law of 1832, the Ameri-
can Company flagrantly defied the Government. Kenneth
McKenzie, its superintendent at Fort Union, who posed
as the baron of the upper river, imported a still and manu-
factured his own corn liquor. He got along beautif\ally
until Nathaniel J. Wyeth, the Massachusetts ice-man,
homeward-bound from his disastrous pilgrimage to Ore-
gon, happened by and asked to purchase a quantity of
whiskey for trading-purposes on his journey. McKenzie
refused, and Wyeth stopped off at Fort Leavenworth to
report a violation of the law I can only suppose he would
otherwise have condoned. The military were prompt to
take action against the offender, whose plea that the law
merely stipulated that liquor must not be brought in was
bootless to save him. The American Fur Company barely
missed having its trading license revoked for this offense;
but Senator Benton and Astor’s other powerful friends at
Washington managed to dispose of the Army busy-bodies
who assailed him.

During the ten years between 1822 and 1832 the United
States was in the condition of a man who has eaten too
heartily, if not too well. Six new states — Indiana, Missis-
sippi, Illinois, Alabama, Maine, and Missouri — ^had been

‘ Senate Dorament No. 58, 1st Session, 19th Congress.

2 1 8 JOHN JA COB 'AST OR

admitted within six years, providing, for the time-being,
sufficient opportunities for the restless elements of the
poptdation that were perpetually shifting westward in the
track of the trappers. The country, speaking relatively,
was prosperous. Like the rest of the world, it was recov-
ering from the dislocation of commerce and industry con-
sequent upon the termination of the Napoleonic Wars.
The second Bank of the United States, of which Astor was
a director, was functioning with an efficiency which in-
telligent business men should presently look back upon
with longing eyes. The tone of the country was healthier
than it had yet beenj credit conditions were sounder and
easier. The beginnings of a national transportation sys-
tem were being laid — ^in 1824 John Marshall would
hand down his decision in the case of Gibbons vs. Ogden,
breaking the Fulton-Livingston steamboat monopoly and
stimulating steam navigation upon the rivers j in 1825 the
Erie Canal would be finished, furnishing a vent for the
agricultural products of the Middle West; in 1830 the
first fourteen miles of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad
would be opened.

So, for a decade, the people suspended the emigration
across the Mississippi.^ It was as if the nation stopped to
catch its breath after the series of gigantic strides which
had carried the inhabited area of the Republic from the
Appalachians to the lower reaches of the Missouri, from
contact with the forest-running Shawnees, Miamis, and
Creeks to contact with the more barbarous and inde-
pendent horse Indians of the Plains. The pause gave
the fur trade a respite it would not otherwise have en-
joyed. For this decade the only pressure on the traders
was the competition between themselves. The West was
theirs from the Missouri frontier village of Franklin to
the Roddes — ^and beyond. For the relentless assaults of
the American Company drove its rivals farther and far-
ther into the wilderness. The line of the Missouri river it

^ Except into Missouri, of course.

THE FIRST TRUST 219

soon made its own, extending its definite sway to the
Yellowstone. By 1831 you find Joshua Pilcher, who had
been American Company agent at Council BlufFs and
later turned against Astor, reporting to Secretary Cass that
during the period from 1823 to 1827 the company had
monopolized the whole fur trade of the Missouri Basin —
‘^and I have but little doubt will continue to do so for
years to come, as it would be rather a hazardous business
for small adventurers to rise in opposition to it.”

Never, in the economic history of this country, has a
corporation marched more ruthlessly across the prostrate
corpses of opponents to attainment of monopoly. General
Ashley, having acquired the respectable fortune, for those
days, of $100,000 in two or three expeditions to the
mountains, retired from the contest to devote his few
remaining years to politics. The Missoxiri Fur Company,
Manuel Lisa’s old firm, about the same time threw up
the sponge and abandoned the river to Astor. Bernard
Pratte & Company, a St. Louis trading firm, he absorbed
as he had Stone, Bostwick & Company — ^mainly for the
purpose of employing Pratte and his expert personnel. I
ought to say that he preferred to take in competitors who
knew their jobs rather than drive them from business j
but he took them in at his own terms, which, you will see,
were not particularly generous.

In 1826 he clashed with the Columbia Fur Company,
a highly competent concern which worked on as big a
scale as the old Northwest Company. The Columbia was
known legally as Tilton & Company, and was organized
by a group of Canadians, who dodged the law forbidding
aliens to operate in United States territory, by placing
dummies in ostensible control of their corporation. These
Canadians, as a matter of fact, were too competent, too
well-established, to be downed except at a wasteful cost,
and Astor bought them over on better terms than he
usually profiFered. The Columbia Fur Company was
welded with the American Fur Company, which now

220 JOHN JACOB AST OR

too£ the name of the North American Fur Company —
although, throughout its career, it was commonly referred
to as the American Company, and, in a few years, shared
with the Hudson’s Bay Company the proud distinction
of calling itself merely The Company. The deal was
more of a union of two corporations than an absorption
of one by the other, providing, as it did, that the Colum-
bia men should withiraw from the Lakes and the Upper
Mississippi, in exchange for which concession their or-
ganization was to operate exclusively on the Upper Mis-
souri above the mouth of the Big Sioux as a subdepartment
of the American Company. The Canadians were proprie-
tors of this subdepartment, and as such practically inde-
pendent of Astor, despite the fact that the subdepartment
was a part of his parent company. They were called the
Upper Missouri Outfit, and considered themselves — and
were so regarded by their compeers of the West — as feu-
dal barons, of whom their overlord might demand, at
most, a certain measure of limited service. It was one of
them, McKenzie, who undertook to manufacture his own
whiskey after the Government had forbidden fire-water to
the Indians, and came close to forfeiting the American
Company’s trading license.

After the Columbia Fur Company had been disposed
of, Astor encountered the French Fur Company, another
St. Louis partnership formed by three local Frenchmen.
They were short of capital, like all the independent
traders, but, again like most of the Independent traders,
they had close connections with the tribes and the friend-
ship of the free trappers. They gave Astor a sturdy battle,
but were willing to sell out at the end of three years,
they and their followers merging with the swelling ranks
of the Trust’s employees. You might think the Louisiana
French would have seen the light after this, but they were
a belligerent, self-confident breed, and there was no lack
of recruits when Narcisse Leclerc, who had been an em-
ployee of the Company, in a fit of petulance resolved to set

221

THE FIRST TRUST

up an opposition. Leclerc was a shrewd fellow, and what
was more he played in luck his first year. Chouteau con-
sulted the younger Astor in New York — ^Jacob was paying
less and less attention to details — and was instructed to
buy him out. But the representative of the Company who
was sent to obtain Leclerc^s terms found a quantity of
alcohol in the Frenchman’s possession, and took it upon
himself to arrest Leclerc and confiscate the alcohol, think-
ing to crush the opposition without any cost to Astor.
The step was ill-advised. Leclerc returned to St. Louis,
and brought suit against the American Company, which,
of course, had neither jurisdiction over him nor right to
confiscate his property, however illegally held. He won a
verdict of $9,200 damages, and satisfied with this sop dis-
appeared from the scene. Perhaps he figured the suit as
one way of mulcting the Company, the end he apparently
had in view in his enterprise.

Long before these latter attempts at opposition, how-
ever, the American Company reigned unchallenged along
the Missouri. From its three bases on the upper river —
Fort Union, at the confluence of the Missouri and the
Yellowstone} Fort McKenzie, near the mouth of the
Maria} and Fort Cass, on the Yellowstone at the mouth
of the Big Horn — ^it dominated the Black HiUs country
and the entire region up to the eastern slopes of the Rock-
ies. The lower Missouri, below the mouth of the Big
Sioux, was not less effectively covered. An elaborate sys-
tem of keelboats conveyed supplies up-stream to the
traders, and fetched down-river the fur bales taken in ex-
change. It is odd that no attempt was made to use a steam-
boat for this purpose until the end of the period, especially
as Major Long, of the Army, had employed the cranky
little Western Engineer to transport his exploring expedi-
tion from Pittsburgh, via the Ohio, Mississippi and Mis-
souri to the mouth of the Platte in 1819. From 1825 on
steamboats increased rapidly on the Mississippi, and to
some extent, on the lower Missouri} but it was 1831

222 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

before the Trust purchased the Yellowstone. She ven-
tured onl7 a little way above Council Bluffs that Spring.
In the following year she reached Fort Union, and there-
afterward the upper river posts were supplied by an an-
nual steamer, in place of the keelboats. Once more a
splendid desolation mantled the yellow current of the
stream for all save a few weeks of open water, but during
those weeks the savages, who always had been willing to
lie in wait to ambush the strings of keelboats, shivered in
awe as they listened to the racketing exhaust of the
white man’s latest wonder.

The profits of the Company were immense. Statistics
compiled by an Indian agent of the expenses and receipts
of the fur trade on the Missouri and its contributory
waters during the fifteen years between 1815-30 tell the
story. He estimated that the expenses of the trade during
this period were $2,100,000, of which total $1,500,000
represented merchandise} $450,000 went for wages for
200 trappers at $150 a year} and $150,000 went for
wages to twenty clerks at $500 a year. The returns he esti-
mated at $3,750,000:

26.000 buffalo skins per year, at $3 $1,170,000

25.000 lbs. beaver skins per year, at $4 per lb.

1,500,000

4,000 otter skins per year, at $3 180,000

12.000 coon skins per year, at $.25 45,000

150,000 lbs. of deer skins per year, at $.33

per lb. _ 742,500

37.000 muskrat skins per year, at $.20 per lb. 1 12,500

Total 1 $3,750,000

The profits of the trade, then, were $1,650,000 for
fifteen years, or $i 10,000 annually — ^the returns being
$250,000 annually upon an overhead of $140,000. But

Senate Document No. 90, First Session, Twenty-second Congress.

THE FIRST TRUST 223

the figures do not begin to represent Astor’s profits from
the Missouri Basin. They are simply the immediate
profits earned by the individual traders on the furs they
forwarded to St. Louis, for Astor’s scheme of operations
threw upon his traders all the responsibility of earning
anything for themselves. He furnished them with trade
goods at a fixed advance upon costs of 8ij4 per cent as
allowance for transportation and immediate profit to him-
self. So he couldn’t possibly lose, in so far as his marketing
of trade goods was concerned. As for the furs which the
traders returned to St. Louis, he paid for these in ac-
cordance with the standard quotations of the day, which
were more likely to be fixed at London and Montreal
than at St. Louis and New York. The truth is that none
of his traders or subordinates — except Crooks, Chouteau
and Pratte — ^grew rich from their association with him.
All the profits, under this sj^tem, went to himself and
his son, who succeeded him as President. The traders and
factors were as dependent upon him, as rigorously obli-
gated to accept whatever terms he might see fit to fix, as
the trappers and Indians were dependent upon them. And
a natural consequence was a tendency toward extreme
measures. His lieutenants were autocrats, their sensibili-
ties toughened by the life they lived, and few of them
were inclined to stop short of fraud, force, or bloodshed
if their own interests were at stake. They knew they had
a hard taskmaster in the impersonal employer they called
The Company. No excuses would be tolerated for failure,
no additional facilities granted. They had stipulated terms
to meet, and they must meet them.

Nor were the fur barons of the Missouri the only feudal
contributors to the Astor exchequer. Rich as it was, the
Missouri Basin was but one of many areas in which the
American Fur Company operated. We have seen how
its ramifications spread during the years after the War of
1812. From the dwindling country of the Iroquois south
along the shores of the Lakes, through the still heavily

JOHN JACOB AST OR

224

forested states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and the immense
raw territory of Michigan, sprawling west to the Mis-
souri, his trading posts were situated at every point of
strategic importance, and farmers gladly eked out the
precarious livelihoods they wrung from the soil by trap-
ping in the winter months on his account. Four dollars a
pound for beaver, the price mentioned in the schedule
cited previously, was remarkably cheap. Before 1830
prime beaver was good for $6 a pound in St. Louis, and
as much as $8 occasionally. There are records of $12 a
pound having been paid for large quantities in the New
Mexican settlements, which the free trappers used as an
outlet for their takings to avoid the long overland trip
to Missouri. And year by year, as the American Company
drove the free trappers deeper into the mountains, and
pushed its own brigades after them, the revenue of the
Astors increased. Exactly how much it is difficult to say,
but William B. Astor, in a letter to the Secretary of War
on November 25, 183 1, replying to a request for informa-
tion as to the extent of the Company’s business, remarked;
‘Wou may estimate our annual returns at half a mil-
lion dollars.”

The only material opposition to the Company was
maintained by a loosely organized partnership of leaders
of the free trappers, or mountain men, as they began to
be termed, in recognition of the fact that the harr3dng
of the Trust had restricted their operations to the more
inaccessible regions of the Rockies, where, a few years
before, men were afraid to venture, lest they be destroyed
by fabulous beasts or giants or the myriads of ferocious
pygmy folk who were reputed to lurk in monstrous cav-
erns and ravines, such as the Grand Canyon. Ironically
enough, the most valuable result of Astor’s participation
in the fur trade was the involuntary work of exploration
carried on by the mountain men, work of a value which
has seldom been adequately recognized by historians and
is unknown to the general public. The profits of the trade

THE FIRST TRUST 225

flowed inexorably into his coffers; the glory of it went to
the free trappers. In the words of one of the keenest
students ^ of his career: “Not only did the company throw
the risks upon individuals, but it has been said, with a
certain amount of justice, that it left to other men and
other companies the task of opening up new regions, which
it could afterward enter with perfect assurance that its
superior resources would eventually enable it to take the
field.”

The opposition of the free trappers was first conducted
under the leadership of the firm of Ashley & Henry,
which was dissolved in 1826 because Ashley had made his
pile and set his thoughts upon entering Congress, an am-
bition he later attained. The goodwill of the firm and
whatever trapping information and equipment it possessed
were sold to the new partnership of Smith, Jackson &
Sublette — ^Jedediah S. Smith, two-fisted Christian, daunt-
less explorer, who “carried beaver to the British and the
Bible to the Flatheads,” first American to cross the Ne-
vada desert to California and to traverse longitudinally
the Pacific coast from San Diego to Fort Vancouver on
the Columbia; David E. Jackson, who discovered Jack-
son’s Hole and blazed a new southerly trail from Santa
Fe to San Diego; William L. Sublette, “Cutface” to the
Blackfeet, perhaps the most successful captain of the
mountain men, certainly the ablest of four hard-fighting,
reckless Kentucky brothers. A notable trio. Around them
rapidly gathered the pidk of the trappers who had fol-
lowed Ashley and Henry, and the more daring of the
recruits who quit the rivers of the plains for the uplands
and independence of the Trust.

Not all the free trappers, however, were immediate
followers of the partners. Several brigades under partisan

^Anna Youngrman, Ph. D., in ‘‘The Economic Causes of Great For-
tunes” j Bankers Publishing* Company, New York, 1909.

226 JOHN JACOB AST OR

leaders o£ repute roamed abroad on their own account,
meeting the chieftains only at the summer rendezvous,
which usually was held in the valley of the Green, but
sometimes in Pierre’s Hole or on the Sweetwater. The
business relations of the free trappers and the independ-
ent trading partnerships were entirely informal. Contracts
were verbal undertakings on the part of the trappers to
sell their catch to the independent traders and a corre-
sponding pledge from the traders to accept the trappers’
peltry. As a rule, no money changed hands in these trans-
actions. Indeed, money would have been useless to the
mountain men. All they required to exist was food, am-
munition, traps, and trade goods to exchange with the
Indians for clothing and horses.

Taos, an Indian pueblo in New Mexico, was a favorite
headquarters of these independent brigades after the
opening of the Santa Fe Trail. From it started one of the
most famous of the ventures of the mountain men, the
journey of Ewing Young’s brigade overland to California
in 1829. Young’s trip was notable for several reasons. It
was the first invasion of California by Americans in any
number 5 ^ it discovered many untouched beaver streams 5
and it marked the entry into frontier history of a tow-
headed, snub-nosed youth named Kit Carson, whose name
was destined to be enshrined beside Daniel Boone’s in
the roster of the pioneers. From the contemporary point
of view of the free trappers, the greatest of Yoimg’s
achievements was the opening up of new beaver country,
always a prime requisite in their struggle for existence.
Viewed historically, it stands out as a milestone in. the
series of episodes which turned the nation’s eyes toward
California. Forty men went with Young, and they trapped
north as far as the Sacramento. The stories of the sur-
vivors were repeated at every campfire, retold again and

^ Richard Campbell had taken a pack train from Santa Fe to San Diego
in 1826; and Sylvester and James Pattie had reached Lower California
overland in 182S.

THE FIRST TRUST 22 j

again, and Ky word of mouth, if not by letter, crossed
mountains and plains to the frontier settlements.

The increasing attention paid to the Southwest by the
free trappers led to the establishment of several trading
posts adjacent to the Mexican frontier by St. Louis firms
technically unallied with either of the contending factions
in the fur war. The best known of these, probably the
best-known landmark of the plains, was Bent’s Fort,
built in 1829 on the north bank of the Arkansas, fourteen
miles above the mouth of the Purgatoire — or Picketwire,
as the Americans twisted the word — ^by William Bent,
senior partner of Bent, St. Vrain & Company. No business
house of the day played a weightier part in the conquest
of the West than this combination of Massachusetts Yan-
kees and Louisiana Frenchmen of the /laitfe noblesse.
The Bent brothers, Charles, William, and George, were
grandsons of Captain Silas Bent, who commanded the
Boston tea-party. Charles was the diplomat of the family;
first Governor of New Mexico under the Stars and Stripes,
he was murdered in the Pueblo revolt at Taos, in Janu-
ary, 1 847, dying as bravely as he had lived. William was
the trading genius ; he made a fortune out of trading and
freighting, enjoying the friendship and confidence of the
hardy Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowas, who named him
“Roman Nose”; in 1852 he blew up the historic post
which bore his name because the Government would not
pay him the $16,000 he asked for it; and unlike most of
the pioneer generation, he died well-to-do. George, the
least distinguished of the trio, was post commander.

The St. Vrain brothers, Ceran and Marcelin, were
equally prominent. Their father was Don Jacques Mar-
celin Ceran de Hault de Lassus de St. Vrain. A relative,
very likely, an uncle, had been Don Carlos de Hault de
Lassus, last Spanish Governor of Louisiana. Of the two,
Marcelin seems to have been the stay-at-home member;
Ceran was as much afield as the Bents, ultimately settled
in New Mexico and waxed prosperous as a miller, became

228 JOHN JACOB AST OR

a prominent and useful citizen, a leader in the Indian
fighting of the late Forties and Fifties and first colonel
of the First New Mexican Volionteers in the Civil War.
He was an intimate of Kit Carson, which is a recommen-
dation for any man.

Bent, St. Vrain & Company were stout friends and sup-
porters of the free trappers j they survived, where other
firms crashed in competition with the Trust, because they
exploited intelligently a general trade with the plains
tribes. Besides Bent’s Fort, they established in 1837 Fort
St. Vrain, at the junction of St. Vrain’s Creek with the
South Plattej and in 1848 the post of Adobe Walls —
where some people think Kit Carson fought the greatest
Indian battle in the annals of the West — on the Canadian
River in the Texas Panhandle. After blowing up the first
Bent’s Fort, William Bent, in 1854, built a second fort
of stone at the Big Timbers, thirty miles down the Arkan-
sas, which the Government finally purchased in 1859,
renaming it Fort Wise, and afterwards. Fort Lyon.

About the time William Bent was shaping the adobe
walls of old Bent’s Fort, the Robidoux brothers — ^An-
toine, Joseph, and Louis — ^who operated a trading firm
with branches at St. Jo and Taos, were erecting Fort
Uintah below the confluence of the Uncompahgre and
the Denison. As salty and picturesque characters in their
way as either the Bents or the St. Vrains, these brothers.
Several pegs below the St. Vrains socially, to be sure,
but equally canny and commercially alert. Good Ameri-
cans, too, despite their undiluted French blood and broken
speech. Joseph seems to have bided home at St. Jo 5 An-
toine was the first fur trader to operate out of Taos; and
Louis went to California in ’44 and became alcalde and
juez de paz of San Bernardino, but notwithstanding,
joined Fremont’s column, with which Louis was serving
as guide and interpreter, and was wounded by a lance
thrust at San Pasqual, where the Mexican resistance crum-
bled. Both Antoine and Louis were explorers and path-

THE FIRST TRUST 229

finders — ^Antoine first user of Mosca Pass through the
Sangre de Christo range in Colorado.

Their post, if not so pretentious a place as Bent’s Fort,
was a favorite resort of the free trappers. In fact, these
two posts were the only fixed resorts available for shelter
or relief to the free trappers until William Sublette built
Fort John where the Laramie Creek flows into the North
Platte in 1836. This third post, taken over by the Govern-
ment when the necessity arose of safe-guarding the trail
to Oregon, was renamed Fort Laramie, and became the
subject of more lore and legend than any post on the
Army list. On the threshold of the open range favored by
the Sioux, there wasn’t a campaign in the next thirty years
in which it didn’t figure. And similarly, during the strug-
gle for mastery of the fur trade, not a season passed that
the traders’ forts weren’t key-points in the battles of
wilderness craft, rate-cuts and trading intrigues. But their
period of greatest usefulness was reserved for the future.
When the next wave of emigration burst across the Mis-
sissippi these isolated dots of civilization were so many
ports of supply, so many goals of endeavor, potential
strongholds against Indian attacks, for the weary trains
that plodded the trails to Oregon and California.

VII

Smith, Jackson, and Sublette made an odd combination.
Smith was a unique personality, a man of education, intel-
ligently curious, with a profound grasp of the science of
geography and more than a casual appreciation of the
kindred sciences} a broad-minded Christian, into the bar-
gain. He kept journals of his travels, some of which are
still in existence, and contemplated an exhaustive work on
the terrain of the Rocky Mountains and the country
west of them, with corrected maps in place of the imagi-
native cartography then prevailing} but unfortunately a
considerable portion of his records was destroyed in a
warehouse fire in St. Louis on the eve of his departure for

230 JOHN JACOB AST OR

Santa Fe — ^and in the course of his journey he was doomed
to perish under the lances of the Comanches. Had Smith
Jived — he was thirty-three when he died — ^he must have
become a leader in national thought, quite possibly a dis-
tinguished statesman, for he possessed a striking gift of
leadership over the wild free trappers, men almost as
dissimilar to himself as the Indians who killed him. And
in addition to his intellectual gifts, he was blessed with a
business acumen which won the respect of his associates.

Jackson we know very little about. He seems to have
been typical of the small group of mountain men who
rose to some measure of distinction, able, resourceful, ag-
gressive, but scarcely remarkable. Aside from his partner-
ship with Smith and Sublette, he is remembered for hav-
ing introduced the first slave to California with a herd
of mules he drove over the southerly route, originally
blazed by the Spanish Padres and recently rediscovered
by William Wolf skill, a mountain man who was seeking
to emulate the exploits of Ewing Young’s brigade. He
achieved no outstanding success, and retraced his steps to
St. Louis to die poor and almost unrecognized.

Of Sublette I have written, so it is unnecessary to
detail his character. His contribution to the partnership
must have been his skill as teamster and freighter. None
like him in all the West to fetch heavily laden wagons
and pack-trains through the perils of travel across the
plains: the constant threat of Indian assault, the dangers
from quicksand and swift rivers, the hardships of the
mountains.

Of the three, I assume that Smith was the planner,
Jackson executive officer and technical man, and Sublette
responsible for transmogrifying peltry into ammunition,
stores and trade-goods. They hung together for four
years, which would indicate that they inclined to sympathy
with one another; and they must have made some money
out of their enterprise, else they could never have lasted
that long. Jackson and Sublette were actuated by ordinary.

THE FIRST TRUST 231

everyday commercial instincts, but it appears from internal
evidence that Smith’s ulterior motive in entering the
mountains and committing himself to the struggle with
the American Fur Company was the acquisition of suf-
ficient knowledge of the Far West to afford him material
for the work he had in mind. He left Missouri, in the
beginning, with Ashley’s expedition of 1823. In the suc-
ceeding years he was indefatigable in his journeys and
investigations, and by 1830 had obtained the material he
desired. He the Northwest. But he didn’t know the
Southwest, and as a first step in the direction of filling
that gap decided upon undertaking a journey to Santa
Fe. It was impossible, however, for him to abandon his
partners in this manner, and inasmuch as they were tiring
of the constant anxiety of the struggle with the Trust they
came to an agreement with him to sell out the business.

This occurred at the moxmtain rendezvous held in Au-
gust, 1830, and Smith, Jackson & Sublette were succeeded
by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, formed by five of
the ablest leaders of the free trappers, as representative a
group as could have been assembled: Jim Bridger, who’d
outlive most of his friends j Milton G. Sublette, Wil-
liam’s younger brother and equally daringj Tom Fitzpat-
rick, as worthwhile as either Bridger or the Sublettes, but
hardly remembered today; Jean Baptiste Gervais, of
whom I can say merely that his inclusion in such a com-
pany must speak for his standing with his fellows; and
Henry Fraeb, called Frapp, a German-American, very
likely a Pennsylvanian, who had been a partner with Ger-
vais in the mountains, and was to die in a battle with the
Sioux and Cheyenne where Battle Creek flows into the
Little Snake in northern Colorado, in August, 1841.

The new company was popular with the mountain men
— ^the French Canadians, who formed so numerous an
element in the American Company’s brigades and were
regarded somewhat contemptuously by the free trappers
of native birth, were placated by the Inclusion of Gervaise

232 JOHN JACOB AST OR

in the partnership. Each o£ the other partners had his lieu-
tenants, who could muster small brigades of their own,
and recruits trickled in from oudying parties all that
summer, as the word was carried over plains and moun-
tains that a stronger opposition to The Company had been
organized. The Blackfeet heard of it from the Flatheads,
and passed the news to the Sioux, whose signal fires car-
ried it to the Cheyenne. A captured Cheyenne squaw told
the Utes, and the Utes told a band of trappers from Taos,
who hastened to give the tidings to their comrades who
hadn’t troubled to ride North to the rendezvous. And
now there were fewer Americans spending money for
whiskey in the Robidoux store at the pueblo, but the
Robidoux brothers weren’t bothered by that — ^the more
free trappers who took to the mountains, the more trade
would come to Taos, for not all the peltry the Rocky
Mountain .Company bought could be transported by its
limited annual train, and many a bale would lurch south
on pony-back to Fort Uintah or Bent’s Fort or Taos.

To tell the truth, the Rocky Mountain Company
needed every man it could muster, for the Trust was
learning the tricks of the game by experience. Strong,
well-organized brigades were penetrating deeper into the
ranges of the Divide. There was a different brand of
leadership to coimter. No longer did the American Com-
pany rely upon Canadians, French or Scotch, to harry the
opposition; but I doubt whether the Astors, father and
son, were really responsible for this shift in policy. Jacob
and William, both, were paying less attention to the de-
tails of management; Jacob was often abroad, nowadays,
and William had to busy himself with the details of in-
vestments of various kinds. The actual conduct of the
American Company’s campaign was left to Chouteau and
Pratte.

And it is noticeable that the retirement of Jacob from
active participation in the struggle was attended by the
employment of leaders of a much higher, more independ-

THE FIRST TRUST 233

ent type. Lucien Fontenelle, without a drop of Anglo-
Saxon-Celtic blood, was a New Orleans Frenchman of
the same aristocratic strain as the St. Vrains, vigorous,
taciturn, and morose in personality, characterized by the
strong individuality of the Louisiana Creoles. Andy
Drips, with whom Fontenelle was first associated on the
upper river, was a Pennsylvanian, who had served with
the Missouri Fur Company, and was trusted by the In-
dians and respected by the free trappers. He was credited
with honest opposition to the use of liquor in the trade.
William Henry Vanderburgh, the third in the trio of
leaders who carried the fur war into the mountains, was
a graduate of West Point, an Indian fighter of prestige,
a soldier and a gentleman. All three were honorable by
the standards of their day and the society in which they
moved. If occasionally they roused the Indians to ambush
their opponents, in order to cut off a supply train or
clear a rich beaver stream, they were doing only what
any one of the Rocky Mountain chiefs would have con-
sidered reasonable in the same circumstances. Jed Smith,
whose probity won him the nickname of “The Knight in
Buckskin,” wasn’t above tricking a Hudson’s Bay brigade
out of a packtrain of peltry. And as a matter of fact,
Vanderburgh met his end a couple of years later in a
Blackfoot ambush, into which he and his men were prob-
ably steered by a Rocky Mountain brigade that didn’t
want to be followed by their rivals into a secret valley,
where the beaver hadn’t yet been annihilated in the
thoughtless fashion which was common to all the trappers.

So, from 1830 on, the fur war waxed fiercer. The
market for beaver had reached a peak. The number of
trappers involved was at the maximum — although it is
estimated that there were never more than 200 west of
the Rockies at one time. And the epic nature of the strug-
gle had liared into the opposing ranks the picked fighters
of the frontier. Hugh Glass, whose hand-to-hand fight
with a erizzly won him immortal famej Joe Meek, first

234 /OOT JACOB AST OR

sherifF of Oregon and a spinner of tall yarns j Bill Sin-
clair, the Arkansan, killed in the fight with the Blackfeet
in Pierre’s Holej Jim Baker, the futxxre guide j Robert
Campbell, soon to climb to prominence — and keep itj
Bob Newell, “Doc,” a new-comer, speaker of the Oregon
Assembly before he died 5 Michel Cerre, another Mis-
souri Creole, who, luckier than many of his brethren, sur-
vived the times of the moimtain men to sample political
triumphs in his native State; Joe Warren, who, on his
deathbed, asked that the only inscription on his tombstone
be: “Discoverer of the Yosemite Valley”; “Old Bill”
Williams, perhaps the most striking of his kind, who
stuck to the mountains after the mountain men had gone,
and is remembered, as many are not, by place-names rec-
ognizing his discoveries; Tom Smith, known as “Pegleg”
after he lost a limb in a skirmish with the Blackfeet, whose
pet diversion was to clean out a raucous barroom with his
artificial member.

I covdd go on forever. There was scarcely a man in
all the hundreds on both sides who wasn’t worthy of
memory, who didn’t perform some feat which served to
familiarize Americans with the country which should be
theirs, that country which Senator Benton, Astor’s hench-
man, had cast away with a phrase: “The ridge of the
Rocky Mountains may be named without ofFense as pre-
senting a convenient, natural, and everlasting boundary.”
But give him his due; Benton should live to regret his
words, and beg President Polk to appoint him General-in-
chief of the armies that were wresting California and New
Mexico and Arizona from Mexico. And likewise give the
unnamed mountain men their due. But for them it would
have taken Americans many years longer to become sufE-
ciently interested in such incredibly far-ofF regions as to
consider the possibility of emigrating there.

That is the fascinating thing about this basically sordid
endeavor of Astor’s to dominate the fur trade. Without
meaning to, he unleashed or stimulated forces of whose

THE FIRST TRUST 235

incalculable effects he had not the slightest comprehen-
sion. Thinking in terms of ledger accounts and dividends,
hungry for more cash to turn into New York real estate,
he’d urge Chouteau and Crooks to advance their brigades
farther and farther, to push these insolent free-trappers
off the map — and Chouteau and Crooks, loyal subordi-
nates, whose incomes were proportionate to their success,
urged Fontenelle, Drips, and Vanderburgh to more de-
termined efforts. No longer were The Company’s bri-
gades satisfied with the peltry of the upper Missouri,
the Black Hills, and the Laramie Plains. They must tread
on the heels of the Rocky Mountain men, laying their
trap-lines on the tributaries of the Seeds-skeedee, the
Sweetwater, and the Green, plumbing the lush recesses of
Colorado’s gorgeous parks, taking their places at the
Spring rendezvous, where Hudson’s Bay men, too, ap-
peared, scouting warily the continuous aggression of the
American companies. And all this restless display of
energy, which was to win eleven states for the Union —
New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho,
Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California, Oregon, and Wash-
ington— and train a legion of guides, explorers, and
path-finders for the migrations presendy to be unleashed,
all this sprang from the spontaneously acquisitive instincts
of the square-shouldered, stiunpy, old gendeman in Vesey
Street, to whom a map of the continent was interesting
principally for the beaver areas it disclosed.

The offensive spirit of the Trust was demonstrated at
the rendezvous of 1831, held in the valley of the Green.
Tom Fitzpatrick, dispatched by his partners to fetch a
supply train out from St. Louis, failed to arrive, and after
months of waiting the assembled trappers dispersed, the
stouthearts disgrimtied, a few dissidents going over to
The Company, others joining a free-lance outfit of St.
Louis and Pennsylvania men, under two leaders named
Gant and Blackwell, seventy in all, that had recendy
secured a precarious lodgment in the Laramie Plains. So

236 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

redoubtable a fellow as Kit Carson was amongst those who
joined Gant and Blackwell, which would seem to indicate
a strong dissatisfaction with the Rocky Mountain Com-
pany’s efforts up to this point. It was a poor year for
beaver, however, and the accessible streams were usually
pre-empted either by the Rocky Mountain or the Ameri-
can Company brigades. The Gant and Blackwell partner-
ship was dissolved in the Spring of ’32, and their company
split apart, some, including Carson, striking off for them-
selves, some going to the Rocky Mountain Company,
some to the Trust.

■ The rendezvous of 1 832 was held in Pierre’s Hole, and
was sufficiently dramatic to satisfy any juvenile admirer
of Mr. Beadle’s more purple novelettes. Here, at last,
appeared Fitzpatrick, his hair turned white as a result of
a dreadful and protracted chase by the Blackfeet — ^whose
ncmvme de guerre for him was accordingly changed from
‘‘Bad Hand” to “White Head.” Of course, he had no
supply train with him, but this defect was remedied by
William Sublette, who was able to accommodate the needs
of the mountain men. With Sublette came the battered,
but undaunted, remnants of the company of seventy-one
New England tenderfeet Nathaniel J. Wyeth was leading
overland to develop the salmon fisheries of Oregon — a
generation ahead of his time, poor Wyeth. Here, too,
was an American Company brigade, led by Drips and
Vanderburgh, exploiting the truce which was informally
declared for the duration of the rendezvous. Here were
friendly bands of Nez Perces and Flatheads, and lurking
on the outskirts, scavengers of whatever loot might fall
to them, a party of fifty Blackfeet, eternal enemies of
the white men. The denouement was what might have
been expected. At the conclusion of the rendezvous, some
400 trappers and their Indian allies, all primed with
liquor, undertook to wipe out the Blackfeet, who sought
shelter in a swamp and manfully stood off the attackers
until night, retiring then with the honors of the fray,

THE FIRST TRUST 237

while the trappers o£ both factions licked their wounds,
buried their dead and resumed automatically the mutual
hostility they had suspended.

Pierre’s Hole was a fitting exclamation point for the
year which was to mark the crisis of the fur war. The
Rocky Moimtain Company, despite mishaps and disad-
vantages, was holding the Trust level j the demand for
beaver was undiminished. But forces were at work beneath
the surface of events which should drastically influence
the fortunes of the mountain men. If you had told Pierre
Chouteau or the Sublettes or any leader of either side
that the days of the fur trade were numbered, they would
have laughed at you — ^^‘Hell,” they’d have said, ‘‘thar’s
alius beaver into the mountings — ^and alius gentryfolk
to wear high hats.” And they would have been right, no
less than wrong.

VIII

For ten years, you will recall, the frontier had been
reasonably stable 5 but 1832 saw a renewed restlessness,
the ganglions of which reached back East across the Mis-
sissippi Valley and the Appalachians into the cities and
communities of the Atlantic Coast. Andrew Jackson had
been elected President in 1828 — ^the frontier, itself, had
elected himj he was the idol of its people, embodying
their rugged virtues as he did the petulance and economic
ignorance which were their worst defects. Narrow-minded,
intolerant, egotistical, he couldn’t see why the United
States Bank, as a national institution, shouldn’t dismiss
trained employees who happened to be Federalists to make
room for any Democratic workers lacking jobs. When
the Bank refused to play politics he turned against it, as
only he could turn, in a breath believing that there was
nothing good in the institution which had, albeit blun-
deringly, maneuvered the country out of the depression
following the last war. The frontier, always suspicious
of the East and the rich, was easily persuaded that the

238 JOHN JACOB AST OR

Bank’s past poliq^ of deflation had caused all the trouble.
The Bank applied for a renewal of its charter, soon due,
and Congress voted approval j but Jackson vetoed the bill,
and Congress, subservient to his dragooning, upheld him.

A shudder passed through the financial centers of the
East, apprehension more pronounced because men of af-
fairs had foreseen the President’s action. Business had
become increasingly unsettled since he was elected. And
almost coincident with the Jacksonian decision to kill the
Bank came the dispute with South Carolina over the tar-
ifF, the state’s Nullification Ordinance, the President’s
Proclamation denouncing Nullification, Calhoun’s resig-
nation as Vice President, and a seething, blistering out-
burst of sectional hatred which clearly presaged the epi-
sodes of 1 855-61. By the dawn of 1 833 the country was on
the verge of civil warj it was Henry Clay, not Andrew
Jackson, who averted the break a generation before it
actually happened. But if Clay averted an armed conflict,
neither he nor any other man could avert the financial
cataclysm which impended. There’d be a comparatively
mild panic in 18335 there’d be a “hell-buster” in 1837.
And throughout this period credit would be tight, busi-
ness unhealthy, poverty and suffering on a scale worse
than ever. But the Administration wasn’t particidarly con-
cerned. So many ruined Americans were emigrating into
the new border states that the revenue from the Public
Lands sales cancelled the last of the Public Debt in 1834,
and after that piled up a dangerous surplus in the Treas-
ury. Everything was for the best in the best of American
worlds — Andrew Jackson was satisfied; the frontier was
satisfied, without exactly knowing why. It didn’t particu-
larly matter what the rest of the country thought. Men
who couldn’t do anything else might always go West,
and buy Government land for $1.25 an acre. Or, if they
weren’t satisfied with such terms, they might go a couple
of thousand miles farther, where land was theirs for
the taking. It is worth noting that so early as 1832 a sub-

THE FIRST TRUST 239

stantial number of people were entertaining this highly
radical idea.

In Boston and Washington, Hall Kelly, Harvard grad-
uate, teacher and author, was agitating feverishly for an
American occupation of Oregonj and the first fruits of his
propaganda appeared at Independence on the Missouri
frontier in this Spring of 1832: Wyeth and the New
England salmon-fishers. Camped a short distance from
them was a party of more than one hundred, led by Cap-
tain Benjamin L. E. Bonneville, an oifficer of the Regu-
lar Army on leave of absence for the purpose of conduct-
ing a private trapping and exploring expedition to the
Columbia. With Bonneville as guide and Indian inter-
preter was no less a person than Jim Bridger, of the Rocky
Mountain Fur Company, who must have believed Bonne-
ville could be used as an ally in the war with the Trust —
a miscalculation. And not far off Bill Sublette was organiz-
ing the supply train which would relieve the wants of the
mountain men at the rendezvous in Pierre’s Hole, while
a hundred and fifty miles southwest at the Council Grove
in what should come to be Kansas, a young man named
Josiah Gregg was preparing for his second trip to Santa
Fe with the largest wagon train which had yet attempted
the seven-hundred-miles journey across the Great Ameri-
can Desert — and framing in his mind’s eye a book to be
called ‘‘The Commerce of the Prairies.” The American
Fur Company was represented in all this plethora of
activity by its new steamer Yello'wstone, puffing up the
lower Missouri on the first leg of an epochal journey to
the mouth of the river after which it was named.

Never since the white man reached the Mississippi had
there been such a bustle and din on the frontier. For in
addition to the extraordinary efforts I have mentioned,
the usual seasonal supply trains were heading west into
the Indian country on behalf of Bent, St. Vrain & Com-
pany and the Robidoux brothers. The Indians were aghast}
the smoke of their signal-fires stained the sky in advance

JOHN JACOB AST OR

240

of the several columns j there was a noticeable trend
toward hostility. From the range of the Pawnee to the
foothills where the Blackf eet pitched their tepees the word
passed from tribe to tribe. More of the Long Rifles come.
How infinitely sardonic that the most crucial development
of this year, 1832, was the result of action taken by the
red men, themselves! For in the summer of 1832 four
Flatheads from the Columbia River arrived in St. Louis
with an appeal which the sentiment of that age could not
ignore. Some years before, Jed Smith h^d visited them,
and preached the Christianity of the Bible. He must have
made a great impression, since a previous delegation had
visited St. Louis in 1830, without securing the missionary
aid they requested. The second delegation were more suc-
cessful, but a year passed before the plea reached the
East, and awoke an answering spark in religious circles,
and still another year before four Methodist missionaries
were equipped to ride West with the supply trains bound
for the rendezvous of 1834, as a first step on their
journey to that vanished Astoria, which Astor was be-
seeching Washington Irving to chronicle at this very
time.

I can find no evidence that he ever heard of the Flat-
heads’ plea. Certainly, he did nothing to assist those who
responded to itj the Sublettes, free trappers and foes to
his company, shepherded the Methodist divines. And as
for Jed Smith, who was molding now in an immarked
grave beside the Cimarron, if Astor ever heard of “the
Knight in Buckskin,” it was as a troublesome opponent who
had been disposed of by Chouteau’s lieutenants, an un-
usual character of no particular importance. But Smith’s
impromptu mission to the Flatheads gave impetus to a
stream of events which won back the American position
in Oregon Astor had frittered away, for the missionaries
were the entering wedge of American penetration.
American trappers could not hold their own against the
disciplined policy of the Hudson’s Bay Company, autocrat-

THE FIRST TRUST, 241

ically administered by the great factor. Dr. John Mc-
Loughlinj but American missionaries, hewing themselves
farmlands and tilling their fields, could subsist quite easily
and. furnished an object-lesson for Americans who pre-
ferred free land to Government land at $1.25 an acre.

So 1832 led up to 1834 — ^and 1834 led to 1842, when
the question of Oregon’s final disposition was brought to
a head by the appointment of Dr. Elijah White as Indian
Agent for the United States and the departure with him
from Independence of a train of 130 settlers, men and
women, who intended, not to trap or preach, but to make
farms and build homes on the banks of the Coliombia and
the Willamette. White’s caravan followed the trails the
free trappers had blazed, and the settlers were moved to
go at all by the tales the free trappers had told, and the
geographical knowledge the free trappers had dissemi-
nated. Very likely, but for Jed Smith, White’s caravan
wouldn’t have started for many years yet. It was a direct
consequence of the operations of the free trappers in
opposition to Astor’s Trust. And surely, a more ironical
situation couldn’t be imagined than this of the men Astor
harried effecting the recovery of the domain he lost —
largely through operations he had compelled them to by
his attempts to crush them.

Nobody, in 1832, could have foreseen this, of course.
Nobody could have known that the pioneer work of the
free trappers plus Jackson’s economic fallacies would pull
the plug that released the greatest of all the migrations.
But everybody on the frontier in 1832 knew that the
Far West was astir, that the fur war was entering its final
phase, and that more and more people were becoming
interested in the resources of the mountain country. It
was as apparent to the Indians as to the white men, and
south in New Mexico the local authorities tightened their
jealous supervision of the dreaded Gringos, both those
who came in over the Santa Fe trail and those who fol-

24-2 JOHN JACOB AST OR

lowed the north-and-south trails along the eastern base
of the Divide and through its foothills.

The winter of 1832-33 one of the hardest the
mountain men ever had experienced. For weeks they were
storm-bound. But conversely, severe weather made for
prime pelts, and there was a splendid catch. The compe-
tition was stifFer, but this was good for the individual
trappers. With Wyeth and Bomreville bidding for men
and fur, the rates of the American and Rocky Mountain
Companies went up. Any trapper, however raw, was as-
sured of a good year. Wyeth, to be sure, spent the winter
in Oregon, where Dr. McLoughlin gave him a suave
reception; but the New Englander came east for the
rendezvous on the Green that summer, the best-attended
the mountain men had ever seen, and afterwards hastened
on across the Plains to Independence, St. Louis, and Bos-
ton, there to embark upon an ambitious program of colo-
nization, which should come to grief and have practically
no influence upon the future course of empire. Bonneville,
futilely inquisitive, was disrupting the fight against the
Trust and picking the brains of the men who had combed
the wilderness for geographical data for his Journals,
which that Prince of Bores, Washington Irving, would
edit as pompously as he had the records of Astoria.

Outwardly, the prospect must have seemed promising
for the Rocky Mountain Company and the cause of the
free trappers. On the contrary, the American Company
had turned the corner, thanks to the disruption of the
opposition by the intervention of Wyeth and Bonneville
and the preponderant weight of its resources. True, Van-
derburgh was dead, but its brigades, under Drips and
Fontenelle, were learning the mountains month by month.
Scarcely a stream in hundreds of thousands of square
miles of rugged territory that did not hear the click of
traps. Ill-feeling sprang up, was intensified in the winter
of 1833-34. The dispersion of the trappers had accen-
tuated the hostility of the Indians of all tribes, and charges

THE FIRST TRUST 243

were not lacking that one faction or another was respon-
sible for ambush or attack. Bonneville, the West Pointer,
class-conscious, of a radically different stripe from his
fellow leaders, played a strange, almost a sinister, role.
Wherever he went, dissensions occurred, and when the
time came for the summer rendezvous, again held in the
’l^alley of the Green, he stayed apart, conducting his own
gathering in the Valley of the Bear, whither he lured the
free trappers by offers of more pay and free liquor.
Could he, perhaps, have been subsidized by the Trust to
destroy the fine solidarity of the mountain men? It seems
fantastic, but more fantastic exploits have occurred in
American industrial warfare.

Yet without Bonneville there was sufficient cause for
trouble. Tom Fitzpatrick, who had barely escaped the
Blackfeet a couple of years since, had lost a supply-train
to the Crows, and was blaming the American Company
for it. Wyeth, on his way East the year before had made
a verbal contract with Milton Sublette to convoy out when
he returned another train for the New Englander’s outfit;
but in the meantime Bill Sublette had brought West a
train on his own account, and the Rocky Mountain Com-
pany decided to use his goods, Milton Sublette joining
with his brother’s partners to disown Wyeth’s claim to
a share. Accusations and counter-accusations flew back
and forth. Wyeth was justifiably sore, gathered together
his goods and followers, and rode on West to build Fort
Hall as a depot for surplus equipment and a headquarters
for his trappers on the upper Snake. Bonneville, taking
advantage of the divisions the Sublettes had precipitated,
strengthened his campaign to seduce men from the Rocky
Mountain Company; and the American Fur Company let
it be known that all competent mountain men need never
fear for employment if they signed on with Drips and
Fontenelle.

A few days of this, and the Rocky Mountain Company
split apart, Gervais and Fraeb withdrawing from the part-

244 JOHN JACOB AST OR

nership — Gervais in consideration of “twenty head of
horse beast, thirty beaver traps and $500 worth of mer-
chandise,” Fraeb for “forty head of horse beast, forty
traps, eight guns and $i,ooo worth of merchandise” — and
the three remaining partners posted the following notice
for the benefit of those trappers who could read:

“The public are hereby notified that the business will
in future be conducted by Thomas Fitzpatrick, Milton G.
Sublette & James Bridger, under the style and firm of
Fitzpatrick, Sublette & Bridger.

“Ham’s Fork, June 20, 1834.

“Thos. Fitzpatrick.

“M. G. Sublette.

^‘James Bridger fHis mark)
“Wit.: W. L. Sublette.”

Four years would appear to have been the average life of
a commercial dynasty amongst the free trappers — ^that
was the tenure of Ashley & Henry and of Smith, Jackson
& Sublette as well as of the Roc^ Mountain Fur Com-
pany. The reorganized Rocky Mountain Fur Company,
Fitzpatrick, Sublette & Bridger, wouldn’t last even so
longj but Bill Sublette, whose signature was attached to
the notice of dissolution as witness, had organized a part-
nership which would prove the longest-lived of all the
independent fur companies. This was the firm of Sublette
& Campbell, formed December 20, 1832, with Robert
Campbell, an Irishman, as junior partner. Campbell was
more of a trader than a trapper and adventurer, although
he possessed the manliness and physical prowess necessary
to command the respect of the frontiersmen. He lived to
become one of the prominent citizens of St. Louis, and
died wealthy and respected.

Sublette & Campbell really started out as a trading and
.transportation firm rather than a fur company. They

THE FIRST TRUST 245

broadened their field of activities to fill the hole created
by the decay of the Rocky Mountain Company and the
general disruption of the free trappers which came to a
head in the summer of 1834. Establishing posts at the
junction of the Laramie with the North Platte — ^here, two
years later, they built Fort John, afterwards Fort Laramie
— and near the American Fur Company’s Fort Union,
where the Yellowstone fiows into the Missouri, they made
such rapid progress that in this year, 1834, they forced
the American Company to agree to withdraw from the
mountains for one year in consideration of a free hand
on the river. This was more than any of their predecessors
had been able to accomplish, and won a breathing-space
for Fitzpatrick, Sublette & Bridger no less than for them-
selves.

Both the independent companies were heartened by the
respite, believing that victory was in sight. But the bitter
truth was that their enemies had been temporarily disor-
ganized by a series of occurrences of which they were
ignorant. Astor, long-headed, cautious, had written his
lieutenants from London the year before this: “I much
fear beaver will not sell well very soon unless it is very
fine. It appears that they make hats of silk instead of
beaver.” He was disturbed, too, by the reports of his more
intelligent agents regarding the depletion of the beaver
due to the reckless and unrestrained methods of trapping
practised by all the companies, his own included. Two
hundred thousand pelts a year were being sent east to
St. Louis, and no attempt was made to preserve breeding-
stock in the villages trapped. For example, a Kit Carson
brigade took 3,000 pelts out of one village. No wonder
that trappers grumbled because areas where once beaver
had swarmed were now depopulated.

The inevitable consequence of such tactics was an in-
crease in the operating expenses of the companies, which
the Trust could better afford than the independents. Even
so, the prospective curtailment of his profits irked Astor,

246 JOHN JACOB AST OR

and he returned from Europe early in 1834 in a state of
acute dissatisfaction — ^intensified, it is true, by his concern
over the financial situation which had been precipitated
by Jackson’s veto of the bill renewing the charter of the
Bank of the United States. The news of his wife’s death
met him at the pier, and was a profound shock to him.
And before he had recovered from this domestic tragedy,
SilUmafTs Journal y the organ of the fur trade, predicted
in its June issue: “It appears that the fur trade must
henceforward decline. The advanced state of geographical
science shows that no new countries remain to be explored.
In North America the animals are slowly decreasing from
the persevering eflForts and indiscriminate slaughter prac-
tised by the hunters and by the appropriation to the uses
of man of those forests and rivers which have afforded
them food and protection. They recede with the aborigines
before the tide of civilization, but a diminished supply
will remain in the mountains and uncultivated tracts of
this and other countries, if the avidity of the hunter can
be restrained within proper limitations.”

His mind was made up. In a question of commercial
significance he had ample vision to foresee the future,
and what he foresaw in the fur trade was a gradual decline
in profits, due as much to the mounting costs of obtaining
furs as to the discovery that hats made of silk were cheaper
and more comfortable than hats of beaver. As it turned
out, indeed, the abandonment of beaver by the hatters
awakened the interest of the furriers, who proceeded to
put it to uses unknown in the past. There was an initial
decline in prices, which reacted severely upon the com-
panies, as we shall see, and the poorer grades never were
worth anything like what they had been to the hattersj
but prime pelts, well-dressed, snapped back to values as
good as or exceeding the old scale. After all, they were
harder to obtain. And the other expensive furs, in demand
for tippets, scarves and coats, and trimming for robes and
dresses, rapidly forged to the front in value as their

THE FIRST TRUST 247

relative rarity became appreciated in the world o£ fash-
ion. But the great days of the fur trade were approaching
their end. Soon it should cease to be a dominant factor
in American civilization. The Indian trader, men like
Jim Bridger, the Bents, the St. Vrains, the Robidoux, the
Sublettes, would supplant it in the public eye. They could
be of value to the emigrating home-makers, who spelled
the fur trade’s doom.

I cannot find that Astor was in any degree regretful as
he summoned Crooks and Chouteau to New York for the
conference which would terminate his active interest in
the industry of which he had been so long the leading
figure. From 1784 to 1834 — fifty years! A long lifetime
in those days. But he was seventy-one, lonely without his
Sarah, beginning to feel the burden of age, although his
physical vigor was outwardly unimpaired and he con-
tinued his horseback rides in fair weather through the
dwindling fringe of countryside that stretched between
the city limits and the Harlem. Linked with his other
reasons for retirement was the feeling that the fur trade
no longer merited his attention, a sentiment shared by his
son. They’d take the Astor name out of business, devoting
themselves henceforth to conservation of their enormous
real estate and financial investments. With an Andrew
Jackson in the Presidency and the national banking sys-
tem gone to pot, the tool of any smart Alec who could get
a State charter and find a printer to run oflF shin-plasters
for him, there was need for the richest man in America
to look to his fences.

So the American Fur Company was dissolved — or,
rather, hewn asunder. Ramsey Crooks “and associates”
took over the Northern Department, of which he had been
the head, together with the corporation namej the West-
ern Department went to the firm of Pratte, Chouteau &
Company, which was formed for that purpose. Naturally,
Astor continued to be heavily interested in the two com-
panies, the notes of which he held} and his voice — or his

248 JOHN JACOB AST OR

son’s voice — ^was heard whenever an issue was raised in the
operations of either one of them. But none-the-less the
present ceased to concern himj he was preoccupied with
Washington Irving’s attempt to salvage his fame from
the wreckage of Astoria. The West, however, refused to
forget him. He persisted in the minds of the men who
had fought him as the arch demon of the fur trade, and
they paid him the high compliment of ignoring the new
title of the Western Department. Pratte, Chouteau &
Company were as much the American Fur Company as
ever, to their own employees and to the lingering free
trappers, if not to the invading settlers, who had no appre-
hension of what the opposing forces in the fur trade had
done to make settlement possible.

His methods persisted, too. Having effected their re-
organization, Pratte, Chouteau & Company refused to
renew the year’s truce with Sublette & Campbell, and
pushed the war against the independent companies with
an access of ferocity. Wyeth, burdened with bad luck and
not so adaptable as the mountain men, made a consistent
failure of all his enterprises — ^whether salmon-fishing in
Oregon or trapping in the valleys of the Rockies. Fitz-
patrick, Sublette & Bridger weren’t as successful as they
might have been, if Sublette & Campbell hadn’t been com-
peting for the catch of the free trappers. It was the old
story of division of forces in face of a superior enemy.
The rendezvous of 1835, in the Valley of the Green,
which was by way of becoming the capital of the fur coun-
try, was almost as cantankerous as the previous year’s.
The single noteworthy inddent was the appearance of two
more missionaries, Samuel Parker and Marcus Whitman,
both of whom should do yeoman service to win Oregon
for the Union. Except for that, the item of greatest inter-
est to the trappers was the rumor that Bonneville was
through — ^news which caused none of them to repine.

Next year Wyeth gave up the struggle, and arranged
to transfer his Fort Hall to the Hudson’s Bay Company.

THE FIRST TRUST 249

With the best intentions in the world, he had achieved
next to nothing by all his labors. His biggest contribution
was the erection of this post on the upper Snake, and it
helped the Canadians, not the Americans, constituting the
easternmost point of occupation of the Hudson^s Bay
Company, as such figuring substantially in the British
counter-claims which secured a compromise of the Oregon
title some ten years later. The rendezvous of ’36 was
made notable by the presence of the first white women to
pass the Rockies, worthy successors of Dorion’s squaw —
Mrs. Marcus Whitman and Mrs. Henry H. Spalding,
faithful missionary wives and helpmates. There were
rumors that the Rocky Mountain Company’s successors,
Fitzpatrick, Sublette & Bridger, were financially shaky,
and the free trappers showed a listlessness toward the
contest with the Trust which was an indication of its early
termination. There was no more of the old-time bitter-
ness and rivalry. Aanerican Fur Company and independent
brigades chummed together friendlywise — ^perhaps, in
part, because of the common dread of the Hudson’s Bay
Company, which had consolidated its position in the moun-
tains by building Fort Boise on the lower Snake. McLeod,
a Hudson’s Bay factor, appeared at the rendezvous ■mth
a Canadian brigade, taking his place in the festivities as
by right. Nobody was surprised, at the breakup of the
gathering, to see Bridger and Fontenelle lead their joint
brigades in company to the North, the free trappers
switching ultimately to the headwaters of the Snake,
the American Company men devoting their efforts to
the'tributaries of the Yellowstone.

For all ordinary purposes, the fur war was ended. But
if there had remained any germ of conflict to menace the
Trust it was dissipated by Milton Sublette’s untimely
death in December of 1836 at his brother’s Fort John.
The firm of Fitzpatrick, Sublette & Bridger was dissolved
immediately, Fitzpatrick and Bridger going over to the

250 JOHN JACOB AST OR

American Fur Company with most of their trappers, the
few who persisted in recalcitrance casting in their fortunes
with Sublette & Campbell, who continued in the field until
1842. But Sublette & Campbell no longer constituted an
opposition to the Trust in the former sense of the word.
They were once more a firm of traders and wagoners,
who dealt in peltry as the occasion arose, and were able
to stand up to the Trust for this very reason: they weren’t
dependent upon fur to fight off competition. Still, there
is no gainsaying the fact that after a fashion they did com-
pete with the American Fur Company, and were able to
do so without being crushedj although here, again, you
must consider the changed drcumstances of the fur trade.
The hectic period of high prices and a wide market, with
an unlimited supply of peltry, was over. There wasn’t
the incentive to cut-throat competition there had been —
no longer need Pierre Chouteau instruct his factors and
superintendents to “ecrassez toute opposition.”

Sublette & Campbell ultimately dissolved by mutual
consent on January 12, 1842, just as the tide of emigra-
tion to Oregon was beginning to flow. Bill Sublette, like
Ashley before him, had his attention fixed upon a seat in
Congress. He was rich, and wanted to play the gentleman;
but fate was unkind to him. Not only did he fail to secure
the prefix “Hon.” in place of the frontier tide of “Cap-
tain” his exploits had earned, but he died in 1845 — ^in
his bed like his brother Milton — while on his way to
Washington to press his claim to appointment as Superin-
tendent of Indian Affairs at St. Louis, a post for which he
was better fitted than a seat in the House of Representa-
tives. So passed a man who had shown himself not un-
worthy of matching spears with John Jacob Astor. His
partner, Campbell, continued the trading business, under
the old firm name.

The Trust was too tempting a mark for blackmail, of
course, to be passed over by those gentry, who, in any

THE FIRST TRUST 251

age and country, undertake to make themselves a nuisance
serious enough to warrant being bought oflF. Half a dozen
litde fur-trading firms sprang up to give Pratte, Chouteau
& Company something to worry about} but the Trust
spiked their efforts by securing from the Government of-
ficials on the frontier a rigid enforcement of the law
forbidding the introduction of liquor into the Indian
country — and without liquor no firm could hope to break
the strangle-hold the Trust had secured on the trade of
the plains and mountains. The last attempt at competition,
the Union Fur Company, was sold out to Pratte, Chou-
teau & Company in 1 845.

Indeed, the fur trade was operating upon an entirely
different basis. Buffalo robes had taken the place of beaver
pelts as the prime requisite. The generation of mountain
men who had torn the veils from the mysteries of the
West had held their last rendezvous in 1839 at Fort Non-
sense, built by Bonneville on Horse Creek, a tributary
of the Green. Here, sitting melancholy about their fires,
counting the gaps in their ranks, they had agreed that the
brave days belonged to the past. Their fellowship was
shattered. Very well, then, they’d call a term to the pres-
ent. And that summer they separated never to meet
again. Most of them were absurdly young — ^Jim Bridger,
one of the oldest, “Old Gabe” they called him lovingly,
or “Old Man of the Mountains,” was thirty-eight. They
weren’t too downhearted as they swung off on the new
trails necessity had blazed for them — some to swallow
their resentment, and accept the sure pay and servitude
of the Trust’s service} some to go in for Indian trading
and transportation} some to try their luck in New Mexico}
Some to join the farmer folk who were heading for
Oregon.

So completely did they disappear that when Fremont
came to Fort St. Vrain in the summer of 1843 hs couldn’t
find one of them to guide him to the foothills of the

252 JOHN JACOB AST OR

Rockies — ^‘‘The race of trappers who formerly lived in
their recesses had almost entirely disappeared,” he re-
corded.

A transition as essentially typical of American life as
Astor’s methods of wringing the life-blood out of a mar-
ketable commodity.

BOOK SIX

THE LANDLORD OF NEW YORK

Intensely conservative in his reactions to life, it wasn’t
astonishing that Astor should have possessed to a striking
degree the European peasant’s respect for the value of
land as an investment. Indeed, all other investments he
considered secondary in importance in the long run, al-
though he acquired considerable amounts of bank stocks
and Government securities. Even in the years of his early
prosperity he seems to have confined his shipping com-
mitments to vessels of which he was the sole owner —
and this was a time when the merchants of the Eastern
seaboard almost invariably subscribed to adventures in
ships owned jointly by groups of men. Such later new-
fangled devices as canal stocks, mill shares, and railroad
bonds he regarded askance. Land was his fetish from the
day in 1789, five years after his arrival in America, he
purchased two lots on the Bowery Lane for $625 cash — •
always he preferred to pay cash, usually, however, exploit-
ing another buyer’s misfortune by taking over a fore-
closed mortgage or offering assistance cannily to settle an
encumbered estate. And unlike other rich Americans, who
flattered their vanity by purchasing great areas of farm
lands, with rent-rolls like an English squire’s, he preferred
to sink his money in property within the confines of Man-
hattan island, assured, as were few of his contemporaries,
of the city to be.

He was fortunate in that his prosperity increased in
direct ratio to the growth of the city. When he landed
New York was “a snug, leafy town of 25,000,” which
had been half-destroyed by two disastrous fires and was
economically prostrated by the evacuation of the influen-
tial Royalist element who had maintained its commerce

255

256 JOHN JACOB AST OR

during the years of British occupation. By 1800, when
his wealth permitted him to speculate almost at will, it
had doubled in population, and expanded a mile north-
ward 3 houses were going up on streets which had been
wasteland when he sold cakes for George Diederichj and
this rate of growth was held consistently, despite the close
rivalry of Philadelphia and Boston. He, himself, lost no
opportunity of announcing his conviction that the city
would continue to grow, nor would he be deterred by the
doubts of men who couldn’t foresee that the country
would develop to a point where a world metropolis woxild
be required to house the nerve-centers of commerce,
finance, and business. On the contrary, he refused to
commit his capital to dwellings, warehouses or stores.
For his purpose — ^the ultimate intrenchment of the Astor
name — ^he wanted farm and pasture land, which could
be bought cheap, and ofFered a prospect of mounting
valuation.

To the despair of his friends, who insisted they would
never be worth anything, he was forever buying up
swamps and rocky fields, without so much as a lane per-
colating through their wilds 3 and occasionally, in order to
finance purchases of this character, he would sell per-
fectly sound residence lots in the settled portion of the
city. For instance, he once sold a house in Wall Street
for $8,000. The pmchaser was very pleased with the deal,
and fancied he’d gotten the better of the adroit Mr.
Astor, who was reputed to be so invincible at a bargain.

“Why,” he exalted as the ink was blotted on the deed
of sale, “in a few years this lot will bring half as much
again as its present value.”

“Very true,” assented Astor, a faint twinkle in his
deep-set eyes, “but now, sir, you shall see what I’ll do
with the money you have paid me. With $8,000 I’ll buy
eighty lots above Canal Street. By the time your lot is
worth $12,000, my lots will be worth $80,000.”

Which was exactly what happened.

THE LANDLORD OF NEW YORK 357

This anecdote is doubly interesting because it points
the fallacy of the popular belief, cherished now for a
century, that Astor never sold a piece of property- He
often sold and traded lots for purposes similar to those
actuating him in the Wall Street deal, that is, whenever
his instinct for values told him he could better an invest-
ment j but again and again he carried wastelands or farms
for years, in face of recurrent chances for a swifter turn-
over, because he believed the city would reach out and
embrace his property in its network of streets. One of
the earlier instances of this tendency was his purchase of
the Bayards’ hay fields on lower Broadway at from $200
to $300 a lot, a price which men of business intelligence
considered outrageous, and over which the Bayards heart-
ily congratulated themselves. But not ^ny years had
passed when the original owners were wishing they hadn’t
chuckled so at Astor’s relieving them of a few hay-stacks.

One reason, probably, for the belief that he never sold
property was that he wouldn’t part with land he regarded
as assured of permanent value, and to this policy more
than any other may be attributed the enormous accretion
of the Astor fortxme. He had brought from Germany the
idea of giving twenty-one year leases on very low terms to
tenants, who would be expected to erect all buildings and
improvements and pay all taxes, the buildings and im-
provements reverting to the owner at the lease’s expira-
tion. This was a novel idea of estate management in
America, and was certainly the cause of most of the popu-
lar dislike of Astor and his descendants. He was a hard
landlord, and while willing to renew a lease on revised
terms to a satisfactory tenant, wasn’t above squeezing the
tenant as opportunity served. It is only fair to remark
that his system is the universal practice in all big cities
today} in New York, especially, practically no valuable
property is sold outright.

The bargains he picked up were phenomenal. No Alad-
din’s lamp could have produced more out of contact be-

258 JOHN JACOB AST OR

tween thumb and brass than he did out of the rugged
acres of Medeef Eden’s farm, which extended from the
old Bloomingdale Road (Broadway), diagonally between
what are now Forty-second and Forty-sixth Streets, to the
Hudon shore — practically the vicinity of Times Square.
Eden had inherited the farm, with its quaint, gambrel-
roofed, Dutch homestead, in 1797. The young Dutchman
promptly got himself into financial difficulties, of which
Astor heard, and passing that way one day on his after-
noon ride, was struck by the prospective value of the spa-
cious fields, and moved to purchase a third-interest in the
mortgage Eden secured. Subsequently, Astor purchased
the remaining two-thirds, and when the inevitable fore-
closure came discovered himself possessed of the Eden
farm for an investment of $25,000. It is worth today
perhaps $50,000,000, and its value must increase prodig-
iously as the westside blocks included in it are converted
to higher-class uses.

The farm of John Cosine, reaching from Broadway
to the Hudson, and from Fifty-third to Fifty-seventh
Streets, which Cosine inherited in 1809, Astor bought in
chancery proceedings for $23,000. Twenty years ago it
was held to be worth $6,000,000, and has very likely
tripled in value since then. Of his great-grandfather’s
real estate deals, the first Lord Astor wrote in a vain-
glorious article in the Pall Mall Magazine, from which
I have previously quoted: “One of the farms purchased
in 18 1 1 for $900 is now worth, with its improvements,
$1,500,000.” Lord Astor doesn’t remark that most of
the improvements, if not all of them, would have been
the contributions of the tenants of the property, which,
in the generation since he wrote, must have profited by
the rise in New York values brought about by forces over
which the Astors, either as a family or as individuals, had
no control.

The East Side farm and rope-walk of John Semlar and
his wife was bought for $20,000. It represents the bulk

THE LANDLORD OF 'NEW YORK 259

of the family’s East Side holdings at this date, and should
be worth in the neighborhood of from $16,000,000 to
$20,000,000. A block he bought in Harlem, which was
then an utter wilderness, for $2,000, is now held at some-
thing like $2,000,000. Another coup of his was to pur-
chase one-half of Governor Clinton’s country-place in
Greenwich Village for $75,000. Clinton’s son-in-law, who
had inherited the Governor’s remaining portion, borrowed
from Astor, using this as security. Unable to pay off the
mortgage, the unfortunate man settled on terms which
gave the fur merchant two-thirds of the entire vast prop-
erty— ^which should be paying his heirs an annual income
of $1,000,000.

It is no small tribute to Astor’s sagacity that that wily
person, Aaron Burr, made notable contributions to his
estate. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the
people of New York, taking their new-won liberties very
seriously, began to chafe at the weight of the dead hand
which the Corporation of Trinity Church extended over
their heads. This feeling definitely found expression in a
reiterated curiosity as to how the church spent its income,
then restricted by law to $12,000 a year. Burr, the shrewd
predecessor of a long line of shrewd leaders of Tammany
Hall, smelled an opportunity for feathering his own nest
at the expense of the unpopular Trinity Corporation,
which stood for the lingering Episcopal aristocracy, and
could claim few friends amongst the mass of Democratic
voters. He initiated, in 1797, a legislative investigation
of the church’s business activities, and secured for himself
the chairmanship of the committee appointed to undertake
it. But nothing happened} nothing ever happened — ^unless
there is significance in the fact that presently Burr secured
for himself the transfer of what was known as the Mortier
Lease.

The Mortier Lease had been made by the Trinity Cor-
poration to Abraham Mortier, Paymaster General of the
British Forces in North America and hence a wealthy and

26o JOHN JACOB ASTOR

powerful gentleman, in the year 1768, when it still meant
something — the Stamp Act to the contrary — ^to wear a red
coat The term of the lease was ninety-nine years, at the
rate of $269 a year, and it covered 456 lots, one-third of
Annetje Jans’ famous farm, which so many people ear-
nestly think they own, in the region of Greenwich Village.
It was a tract of hills, swamps and commons, picturesque
in a rough way, and Mortier built a rather handsome
house on it, which he called Richmond Hill and used for
a country place. Here he lived swankdly until the Revolu-
tion came along, and upset the applecarts of the gentry
who had labored for the King — and here Burr, in time,
by dint of devious means such as I have indicated, sup-
planted Paymaster General Mortier, and lived quite as
swankily, indeed, more so, for Aaron Burr was a bigger
figure in the opening years of the nineteenth century than
ever Mortier had been in the* decade preceding Lexington
and Bunker Hill.

A spendthrift, Aaron Burr, a man whose mind was
invariably probing possibilities of riches, whose tastes for
material splendor led him to maintain the standards of a
great nobleman. His first thought, after securing the
Mortier Lease, was to turn it to active account, and he
proceeded to obtain a loan of $38,000 from the Bank of
the Manhattan Company — ^in which, please note, John
Jacob Astor owned 1,000 shares. That was a lot of money
in those days, but not enough for Aaron Burr, continually
in hot water, although in the eyes of patient, hard-work-
ing Jacob Astor, bent on changing furs into tea and tea
into dollars, the slim, nervous figure of the Vice President
of the United States must have seemed remote from all
touch of misfortune. But there came the duel with Ham-
ilton, and the smoke of the pistols drifted from Weehaw-
ken Heights to the shabby Capitol at Washington, obscur-
ing that graceful figure, very soon obliterating it from
popular interest. And afterwards there was the mysterious
venture down the Mississippi, and the trial for treason

THE LANDLORD OF NEW YORK 261

in Richmond, JeflFerson hammering at the man of whom
he’d always been jealous, and John Marshall, granitelike,
refusing to play the hangman for political expediency.

Acquitted, but disgraced, outcast by the party he had
led. Burr sought exile until time should have blunted
people’s memories} and more than ever in want of money,
he turned to Astor, with whom he had maintained a cour-
teously patronizing acquaintance for some years. Astor
knew Richmond Hill, knew it better than its owner. The
fur merchant saw streets threading its rocky surface,
blocks of houses rising on filled-in swamps j and he took
the Mortier Lease o£F Burr’s hands for $32,000, subject
to the Bank of the Manhattan Company’s mortgage, which
he satisfied at once. First and last, the lease cost him
$160,000, or less than $300 a lot, and Burr had
scarcely sailed when he commenced to sublease the area,
taking care that these subleases were drawn so as to expire
in 1866, a year before the ninety-nine year master lease
ran out, which had the effect of giving him the reversion
of the buildings and improvements put in by the sub-
tenants, and the right to a renewal of his own lease from
the Trinity Corporation on better terms than woiild other-
wise have been the case.

Burr was dismayed by the profits Astor obtained from
property which had been no more than a source of satis-
faction for his social vanity, and upon his return from
self-imposed exile tried to break the transfer he had nego-
tiated. Bfis attempt, however, was unsuccessful, and far
from manifesting any further resentment in the matter,
he proceeded to lend his secret advice in the waging of
the most ruthless coup of Astor’s career — a coup which
was perhaps more cold-bloodedly selfish, more directly
anti-social, than any undertaken by any American, of
Astor’s time or since. A coup, too, for which it is fairly
certain that Burr was fundamentally responsible — ^through
the whole texture of the Morris Case runs the vein of
legalistic cynicism typical of Burr’s attitude toward life

262 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

and scarcely less repellent than Aster’s impersonal hunger
for acquiring wealth, regardless of the primary injustice
of methods tolerated by the mechanism of the law.

The Morris Case came about in this wise. Roger and
Mary Morris were owners of an estate comprising 51,102
acres, or nearly one-third, of the area of Putnam County,
New York, which Mary Morris had inherited from an
ancestor named Adolphus Phillips. The property orig-
inally had been purchased by the father of Adolphus,
Frederick Phillips, with funds obtained from financing
two cruises of Captain Samuel Burgess, who was sent to
Madagascar to trade with the pirates using that island as
their headquarters for raids upon the commerce of the
East Indies. Burgess turned pirate, himself, but vindicated
his personal honesty by rendering just account of his
spoliations to his backers in New York! The profit of
his first voyage was £5,000, of his second £10,000 and 300
slaves. Phillips, with his share, set up as a country gentle-
man in what was then a remote corner of the Province.
The land was never fully developed by him or his de-
scendants, but, of course, its value increased with the ex-
tension of settlement and the recession of the Indian
frontier.

Roger and Mary Morris had done little more with the
property than their predecessors when the Revolution
came. They were Royalists, like so many of the great
land-owners, and as Tories, were obliged to flee the coun-
try after the success of the Patriot cause. In the meantime,
their estate had been sequestrated and declared forfeited
by the State of New York, which sold off the land in
small blocks to some seven hundred farmers, giving titles
to each individual purchaser. So far, so good. An immense
tract of pleasant country, which had been managed with
a narrow regard for the comfort of one family, was now
serving the wants of 3,500 individuals, at a moderate
estimate. A dent had been made in the system of feudal-
ism, which had been strongly established in New York

THE LANDLORD OF NEW YORK 263

under the Crown, and should fight to preserve its rights
until the last of the Patroon estates was dissipated — sev-
eral generations ofF yet. But the State had been betrayed
into a technical error in its forfeiture proceedings. Some-
one in London, a lawyer, about the time Burr was there,
told the Morrises that they — ^Roger and Mary — ^had pos-
sessed only a life interest in the property, which, with all
its improvements, under the deed conveying it to Mary,
belonged in fee to their heirs.

Here was a pretty kettle of fish! The State had acted
honestly, if mistakenly. It had treated the Morrises no
worse than such arrant Royalists as the Johnsons and De-
Lanceys. The Morrises, themselves, in fact, didn’t realize
their claim irntd it was pointed out to them — and by that
time Roger was dead} Mary lived on until 1815. But
whoever discovered the flaw in the State’s proceedings,
whether Burr or someone else, looked upon it simply as
an opportunity to make money, regardless of the conse-
quences. The natural course, in the circumstances, would
have been for the heirs to bring suit, a tedious proceeding,
to be sure, and expensive} but reputable lawyers would
have eagerly assumed the case. The actual proceedings
bore a sinister cast. An agent of the heirs — ^was he Burr?
brought their claim to Astor’s attention in 1809, after
Roger’s death, and sold it to him for $100,000.

Astor was powerless to move before Mary’s death,
when he brought suit for recovery of the 51,102 acres,
the seven hundred farms, the hearthstones and chimney-
corners and barnyards of the 3,500 people, who had gone
into the Morris estate, and made an American community
out of it. He regarded himself as absolutely justified in
so doing, and was provoked, if undismayed, by the vitu-
peration which was poured upon him. He hadn’t the
slightest sense of wrong-doing. He had paid his $100,000
to the heirs, who, by a code as legalistic as that which he
adopted, were traitors to the country which had furnished
him his opportunity to rise from a peasant’s hut to wealth.

264 JOHiV JACOB AST OR

It was merely a speculation in land, and he was indiffer-
ent whether the profits of it were wrung from the people
of the State of New York or the 700 farmers who had
taken the place of the Morrises. That was business, to
him. A state, the people — and I can only suppose his
country, as well — ^must pay for an oversight in judgment
equally with an individual.

The State, say this for it, acted with honorable dispatch.
Commissioners were appointed by the Legislature, who
heard the evidence, and found Astor’s claim legal. They
asked him to name a redemption price, and he offered
to take one-half the estimated value of the land, which
was $667,000. This the State considered extortionate, and
refused to agree to. So the case dragged along, with Burr,
I suspect, in the background, advising Astor. In 1819 he
repeated his offer, with interest added} but the State
again declined it. There was much uneasiness, suffering
even, amongst the titleholders under the State through-
out these years of delay — & farmer cotddn’t secure a mort-
gage or sell his land} there was uncertainty about wills
and successions. All the 3,500 individuals settled on the
Morris tract were miserable while Astor bickered and
wrangled to obtain the profit he sought.

At last, in 1827, it was felt that the case must be defi-
nitely determined, and the Legislature enacted a law pro-
viding that Astor’s claim should be satisfied, if he first
obtained judgment from the Supreme Court of the
United States in favor of the legality of his title. Five
suits should be brought} if three of the five were decided
in his favor he would receive $450,000 for his rights,
subject to a deduction of $200,000 in the event that the
Coxurt held the buildings and improvements did not go
with the ownership of the land, and with any award he
was to have, in addition, interest on the sum of it from
AprU, 1827. On his part, he must, within thirty days of
the Court’s decision, execute a deed of conveyance in fee

THE LANDLORD OF NEW YORK ^65

simple to the State, with a warranty against any future
claims from the Morris heirs.

This offer Astor accepted. Emmet & Ogden were his
attorneys — ^with Burr’s slender, black form lurking in the
background. For the State of New York appeared Daniel
Webster and Martin Van Buren — the one to be Secretary
of State, the other to reach the White House. Two abler
or more distinguished counselors couldn’t have been
found. But the case of the Morris heirs, which Astor had
made his own was impregnable against the lore and the
oratory of its opponents. In June, 1830, the Supreme
Coxirt decided the third case against the State, and there
was authorized in favor of Astor a special issue of five per
cent State Stock. After twenty-one years, the lifetime of
an Astor lease, the men and women who had made the
Morris tract by this time worth in excess of $1,500,000
might go about their work secure in the knowledge that
their homes and crops belonged to them. As for Astor,
it is perhaps sufficient to remark that in 1830 he had been
the only man in New York worth as much as $1,000,000.
Now, he was worth a half a million more. He slept as
well as he had before, ate as heartily and his conscience
was untroubled. So much for the advantages of the single-
track mind!

It is singular that a man as generous and kindly as he
was in his family relations shoxold have been so merciless
in taking advantage of the troubles of others. Trinity
Corporation, which was land-poor, sold him many small
lots at various times, lots which have been lucrative rent-
producers for scores of his descendants. In the panic of
1837, when real estate and securities values crashed, he
bought a relatively immense quantity of land at bottom
prices. It was said of him that at this time he appeared as
complainant in sixty difFerent suits, winning most of them,
and usually ruining those he defeated. The man was inde-
fatigable in making money. Not that scoundrel, Daniel
Drew, had a keener eye for a sure profit. In 1832, when.

266 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

Eighth Avenue between Thirteenth and Twenty-third
Streets, was being graded, the earth removed was sold to
a contractor by the city for $3,049.44. Astor, with Stephen
D. Beekman and Jacob Taylor, petitioned the Board of
Aldermen for those portions of the sum representing the
earth taken from in front of their lots!

He was always asking favors of the city, title to a
closed country road, the grading or improvement of streets
on his properties, sewers. And he wasn’t above taking a
leaf from the book of Trinity Corporation and its favored
members in seeking grants of city land. In 1 806, he ob-
tained two such grants on Mangin Street, between Stan-
ton and Houston, and on South Street, between Peck Slip
and Dover Street; May 30, 1808, he received a grant
along Hudson Street, bounding Burr’s estate, which he
had recently acquired; in 1810 he received three water
grants in the vicinity of Hubert, Laight, Charlton, Ham-
mersly, and Clarkson Streets; April 28, 1828, three on
Tenth Avenue, from Twelfth to Fifteenth Streets. Of
course, he fared in this wise no better than other rich mer-
chants, who took advantage of the city’s desire to promote
the extension of available land, the grantees bearing the
expense of filling in or draining, and reaping whatever
profit was involved. But in this, as in all similar enter-
prises in the history of every big city, there was a constant
swirl of corruption and graft under the surface of what
passed for praiseworthy civic projects.

His son, William, was equally pertinacious in search
of wealth. It was William who bought one of the most
valuable Astor holdings, the Thompson farm, east and
west of Fifth Avenue, between Thirty-second and Thirty-
sixth Street, on which, amongst hundreds of other struc-
tures, stands the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. And William
continued to buy likely properties after his father had
ceased to. But after all, the bulk of the Astor fortune, a
fortune worth today close to half a billion dollars, is

THE LANDLORD OF NEW YORK l6^

based upon the total of $2,000,000 which John Jacob
Astor invested in New York real estate.

It was inevitable that Astor’s character should be af-
fected by so pronounced a habit of soulless acquisitiveness
as he developed. His punishment was as severe as his bit-
terest enemy could have wished, involving the life and
happiness of his youngest and favorite daughter, Eliza,
whom he compelled into a marriage with a man she didn’t
love: an episode which contains all the stock requirements
of the school of fiction dear to Eliza’s generation — and
not entirely out of favor in this sophisticated era. She was
a romantically inclined girl, the least robust of the three
surviving daughters, when, in 1823 or ’24, she met and
fell in love with a handsome young dentist, Eleazar
Parmly, native of Vermont, who conducted a fashionable
and lucrative practice at 297^4 Broadway, at the corner
of Duane Street.

Eleazar and his brother, Levi, who was then estab-
lished in New Orleans, have a secure place in the history
of American — or, indeed, Exuropean, dentistry. They were
men of culture, charm, probity and extraordinary skill,
who were largely responsible for lifting their profession
to its present level j and they are likewise notable for the
fact that no less than sixteen of their descendants followed
in their professional footsteps. Eleazar died worth $3>-
000,000, and possessed an international reputation rivaled
only by that of Dr. Thomas W. Evans, of Paris, the
American who assisted the Empress Eugenie to escape
from France after the downfall of the Second Empire.
According to a descendant of Solymon Brown, one of
Eleazar’s partners : “It cannot be questioned that Eleazar
Parmly stood at the head of the dental profession in this

* Lawrence Parmly Brown, D. D. S., of Peekskill, N. Y., in ^'The
Greatest Dental Family,^’ Dental Cosmos for March, April, and May,
1923, to whom I am indebted for this information.

268 JOHN JACOB AST OR

country for some thirty years, and that no dentist before
or since has occupied such a prominent position here, repu-
tation with the laity and professional brethren being taken
into account.”

A dentist, however, in 1824, had no social position what-
soever. He was regarded as perhaps a peg or two higher
in the scale than a barber and much inferior to a surgeon.
There were no colleges of dentistry, no recognized de-
grees, no professional societies or publications, and very
naturally, dentistry was a prey to hordes of quacks, who
blurred the really magnificent work a number of honest
men of scientific bent were doing to lay the groundwork
for the modern conception of care of the teeth — ^Eleazar,
himself, stated in a public address a quarter of a century
afterward that when he was a beginner in New York it
was the custom for patients not to recognize their den-
tists on the street. But Eleazar was by no means an ordi-
nary young man. Existing portraits represent him as big-
framed, with finely proportioned head and thoughtful
face. He had pretensions to being a poet, read widely out-
side the bounds of surgery, was a good speaker and lay
preacher and could take care of himself physically in an
emergency — he thrashed a Middle Western bully in 1818,
when gouging and biting were the accepted rites of the
frontier.

So here were all the materials for a romance: the rich
merchant’s daughter, gentle, affectionate, refined} the poor
young man of talent, worthy, struggling to improve him-
self. More, you have the sympathetic mother of the rich
girl, secretly assisting the lovers, for Mrs. Astor is repre-
sented in the traditions of the Parmly family as having
been in favor of the affair and assisting to conceal the
engagement which was entered into. But one other person,
Eleazar’s partner, Solymon Brown, was privy to it, and
the secret was kept until Astor announced to his family
that he wished Eliza to marry Count Vincent Rumpff, a
Swiss, who had been minister of the German Free Cities

THE LANDLORD OF NEW YORK 269

at Paris and later represented them at Washington. Both
Mrs. Astor and Eliza objected to this project, but Astor,
for once, was stubbornly dogmatic. His other children
had made excellent marriages with commoners j he wished
now to have a title in the family, an entree, very probably,
into diplomatic and aristocratic circles abroad. He had
spent the years 1820-22 in Europe, and was persuaded of
the advantages of a son-in-law of RumpfF’s position.

Hitherto a benevolent tyrant to his children, he was
nevertheless a tyrant, and when Eliza moaned and
pleaded and her mother supported her he silenced them as
curtly as a business competitor. His daughter marry a
dentist! A common fellow, whom nobody of standing
greeted on the street! Nein, nein! Ach, nein! And his
guttural voice lapsed into German, as it did in the rare
moments of temper which assailed him. The stupid girl
must get over her craziness, and as for Sarah, it was not
for a loyal wife and a good mother to support such an
intrigue. Sarah, being Sarah, didn’t bow her head, and
admit wrong-doing. What, after all, she wanted to know,
had Jacob boasted when she married him.? Hadn’t he sold
cakes in the street, himself? Did he recollect receiving
bows from the great ones of the town when he staggered
along Broadway with a pack of furs on his back?

Jacob was constrained to subterfuge. He sputtered out
his anger, and presendy annoimced that they would all.
go abroad. There was no need for hurrying the marriage.
Go abroad, and show the girl Paris. Let her see what she
was giving up. Sarah assented, and Eliza perforce yielded
with her mother. They sailed in one of those blunt-bowed
packet-ships that clop-clopped through the waves for six
weeks or so to Havre — and when they reached Paris,
there was Count RumpfF to receive them. What Eliza said
or did I don’t know, but her mother is reported to have
sat down and written Eleazar Parmly in New York to
come to Paris and snatch his sweetheart away. Eleaz^
came — sailing in the fall of 1825, probably, as there is in

270 JOHN JACOB AST OR

pyigtffnrp a manuscript poem o£ his addressed to his friend,
Solymon Brown, dated July of that year, in which he re-
fers to his imminent departure for “far-distant countries,”

He arrived too late. Eliza and her Count had been
married, December lO, and all the satisfaction he had for
his voyage was the sour pleasure of bidding the weeping
bride farewell as she started for Switzerland with her hus-
band. But Mrs. Astor consoled him, and after her return
to New York sent him a check for $i,000 to reimburse
him for the expense he had been to and the professional
fees he had lost. His acceptance of the money was mainly
an appreciation of the goodness of heart of the friend
from whom it came. Eleazar Parmly was no sycophant.
Neither was he incurably damaged in heart, for, a year
and a half after Astor had out-maneuvered him, he mar-
ried a charming, accomplished lady — ^who was also an
heiress — ^who rejoiced in the name of Anna Maria Valk
Smith, with whom he lived happily for many years, but
not too happily to make him forget Eliza. In 1854?
again in 1862, he made pilgrimages to the Swiss villa
where she had died, and to the grave in a churchyard near
Rolle where she was buried. If several of his manuscript
poems mean what they say, he was inclined to the belief
that she died, as much as anything, from a broken heart.

And perhaps she did. She only lived eight years after
her marriage, and I gather that her health was failing
during most of that time. Her father spent the last five
years principally with her, and personally, I don’t be-
lieve his interest was solely in the opportunities to meet
nobles and royalties his son-in-law helped him to. Good
German that he was, Jacob Astor loved a title, a trait in-
herited by several of his descendants. He made several
tours of Germany, visiting and revisiting his birthplace,
and pensioning the surviving relatives he could find; and
with introductions from William to friends of the Goet-
tingen days or from RumpfiF to Grand Ducal notables, he
enjoyed himself thoroughly at the stuffy little Courts,

THE LANDLORD OF NEW YORK 271

where all the pretense of Paris and Vienna was imitated,
and the Opera Houses satisfied his honest craving for de-
cent music. He was presented to Charles X and Louis
Philippe, and attended the coronation of Ferdinand II
at Naples; and his genuine respect for learning and ac-
complishment enabled him to appreciate meeting Guizot
and Metternich.

Two of his winters he passed in Italy, and he purchased
a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva for summer resi-
dence— Italy in winter and Switzerland in summer were
becoming necessary for that fading flower, Eliza. What-
ever pleasure her father derived from their ramblings
amongst the great of the earth, her joys were shortly
limited. Late in the year 1833 she gave up the battle for
existence; and Astor, sadly broken and disheartened, wor-
ried, too, by the financial storm gathering at home and
the sequence of events threatening the prosperity of the
fur trade, took ship for New York, where worse news
awaited him, had he but known it. He was able to embark
on the crowded packet Utica only because her master,
formerly in his employ, yielded up the captain’s cabin to
him; but so rough were the seas encountered after leav-
ing Havre that the distracted old man besought the Cap-
tain to land him at the nearest English port.

The Utica^s skipper, perhaps maliciously, took pleasure
in repeating in New York the debate which ensued — “I
gife you ’tousandt dollars, Cabptain, to put me aboardt
a pilot-boat.” “I’ll be glad to in the morning, Mr. Astor,
if the storm continues. It may blow over in the night.”
But the storm increased so in the night that the ship was
blown far west of Ireland, and Astor was more frightened
than ever. “I gife you fife t’ousandt dollars, Cabptain.
Nein? I gife you ten t’ousandt! ” “But Mr. Astor, I should
forfeit my insurance if I put back.” “Can’t I insure your
shibp?” “I don’t see how, sir. And there are the rights
of the other passengers to be considered. I can’t incon-
venience them by breaking the voyage.”

272 JOHN JACOB AST OR

Later that day the gale abated, and the Captain went
to Astor and ofEered to put back, if the other passengers
consented to the stop. Astor seemed surprised, mumbled
something indistinctly and finally indicated his assent.

must have a draft from you for the amount you prom-
ised, Mr. Astor,” returned the Captain, who had had
experience with his former employer’s peculiarities. And
presently, while the Utica* s skipper was discussing the
proposition with the other passengers, who were inclined
to yield to an old man’s terror, Astor came up and ofFered
him a paper on which there was an illegible scrawl. ‘What
is this, Mr. Astor?” asked the Captain. “A draft on my
son.” “But nobody could read it, sir!” the seaman pro-
tested. “That’s not a signature. Here, let me write it
out for you, and then you sign.” “Nein,” denied Astor.
“Dot draft you take or none.”

The voyage was resumed.

On April 4, 1834, Philip Hone made this entry in his
diary:

“Mr. John Jacob Astor arrived yesterday in the packet-
ship Utica from Havre. The news of his wife’s death will
be the first to meet him. He comes in time to witness the
pulling down of the block of houses next to that on which
I live — ^the whole front from Barclay to Vesey Streets,
on Broadway — ^where he is going to erect a New York
'palais royaly which will cost him five or six hundred thou-
sand dollars.”

Poor Sarah! Poor Jacob! They had agreed rather
better than most married couples, disagreed less, too. And
not once had there been an intrusion of jealousy or in-
fidelity in their relations. If, by reason of her disposi-
tion and the social ideas of the day, she was content to live
in retirement, while he brushed wits with the nabobs and
pundits, still she had the satisfaction of knowing that her
help had made him what he was. Without her, his career

'I'm: Buii-DiNCi on Broadway Bltween Vesev and Barclay Streets Was
Started in 1834

THE LANDLORD OF NEW YORK 273

must have been different, possibly devoid of conspicuous
success, for she was as good as a partner to him in the be-
ginning of his independence. He owed her all that a man
could owe to a woman, and it is to his credit that he gave
evidence of missing her in the years of loneliness that
stretched ahead of him.

He was stunned when William climbed aboard the
Ufica, pale and uneasy, and nervously twitched him aside
from the group of passengers to administer the blow.
Sarah dead! It didn’t seem possible. Sarah, who had al-
ways been at hand when he needed her. Sarah, who had
worked so loyally in the meagre years. Sarah, who had
borne so gracefully, so unostentatiously, the fruits of
wealth she had helped him acquire. It couldn’t be! He,
himself, was stout and strong — seventy-one, but able to
keep up with men twenty years younger, as fond as ever
of a good horse, a rousing song or a glass of beer. The
tears trickled from his blue eyes that had lost none of their
youthful brightness, and the ship’s officers and the pas-
sengers, who had been inclined to laugh at ‘‘the stingy
old Dutchman” behind his back, were suddenly sorry for
him, realizing poignantly that millions could buy no in-
surance against grief, whatever their power at Lloyds.
But their sorrow couldn’t help him, any more than Wil-
liam’s grave condolences. The fact was that this was one
affliction he must bear unaided, the first such experience
since he’d married Sarah, and set up housekeeping under
Mrs. Todd’s roof.

Even the sting of Eliza’s death had been modified by
the expectation of Sarah’s support, without which he was
lost, although he stubbornly refused to bend his back or
accept an arm to lean on. Grimly, determinedly, he
plunged into the innumerable details of business awaiting
him after his absence, seeking an anodyne for his heart-
ache in the mental fatigue which followed grinding days
spent in studying the reorganization of the American Fur
Company, and the winding up of his interests in it j in con-

274 JOHN JACOB AST OR

ferring with bankers and merchants upon means to check
the industrial depression the President had brought about
— ^and in noting opportunities for personal profit in the
current welter of bankruptcies and tight money; and
finally, in supervising the construction of the big hotel
he designed to be a monument to his name.

The indefatigable Mr. Hone duly chronicled the in-
ception of the pile, which was to be a landmark of the
growing city for the next three generations:

“May I, 1834 — Mr. Astor commenced this morning
the demolition of the valuable buildings on the block
fronting Broadway from Barclay to Vesey Streets, on
which ground his great hotel is to be erected. The dust
and rubbish will be almost intolerable; but the establish-
ment will be a great public advantage, and the edifice an
ornament to the city, and for centiiries to come •mil serve,
as it was probably intended, as a monument of its wealthy
proprietor. I am sorry to observe since Mr. Astor’s re-
turn from Evirope that his health is declining. He appears
sickly and feeble, and I have some doubt if he will live
to witness the completion of his splendid edifice.”

The italics are mine. Mr. Hone was wrong in his judg-
ment of the building’s permanence as he was in his esti-
mation of its builder’s health. “Sickly and feeble” Astor
■was, sore in soul and body. Why not? In a few months
he had lost the wife who’d given him fifty years of happi-
ness and a favorite daughter — a daughter for whose early
death, perhaps, he somewhat blamed himself. And if
Sarah’s loss obliterated the pang of Eliza’s, he couldn’t
avoid being reminded of his daughter’s early romance
whenever he passed the handsome new quarters of Eleazar
Parmly at ii Park Place or read in the ne'wspapers the
dentist’s denunciations of the Crawcour brothers, who
were recently arrived from London, and cutting into the
business of the local practitioners with their Royal Mineral
Succedaneum, as they called amalgam. He had a right to
be “sickly and feeble”; but there was steel in the old Ger-

THE LANDLORD OF NEW YORK 275

man’s backbone. Not for many years yet would he be
content to yield the life he enjoyed so tenaciously. Soon,
as the summer heats warmed his vitality, his squat, heavy
figure would appear on horseback again, bouncing along
through the dust of the country roads beyond Greenwich
Village, eyes alert for a “For Sale” sign on some likely
patch of farmland.

The building of the new hotel helped more than any-
thing else to divert his mind. He had projected it ever
since his City Hotel, at the corner of Broadway above
Trinity Church, the town’s fashionable hostelry, famous
for its political and militia dinners, had been destroyed
by fire. But he was determined to build the new hotel in
a certain spot: the blockfront on Broadway, between Vesey
and Barclay Streets, occupied by the row of houses in
which he had dwelt for thirty-four years, and to acquire
the other plots in the row required considerable negotiat-
ing and bargaining, extending over a period of several
years. An inkling to the difficulties he outfaced is given
by our gossipy friend, “Walter Barrett,” in “The Old
Merchants of New York”:

“His neighbors who occupied houses facing upon
Broadway, where the Astor House now stands, were all
prominent men. I think the numbers were 213 to 227.
Mr. Astor . . . lived at 223 — ^north of him, on that cor-
ner of Barclay, was 227. That house was owned and oc-
cupied by John G. Coster. It was the last property pur-
chased by Mr. Astor to give him all the land required
upon which to build his contemplated hotel. He had pur-
chased all the other portions at very low prices. Not over
$15,000 a lot and house of 25 by 100 feet. Mr. Coster
would not sell at any price. There was no chance of his
ever wanting money or of being forced to sell. Mr. Astor,
while he was making the purchase of other property, had
let no one into his secret intentions. Finally he went to Mr.
Coster, and told him frankly: ‘Coster, I am going to build
a hotel. I want the ground upon which your house stands.

JOHN JACOB AST OR

276

It is of no particular use to youj you can go up Broadway,
above Canal Street, and build a palace with the money
I will pay you. Now I wish you to name two friends, and
I will name one. The three shall fix the value of No.
227. When they have done so add $20,000 to it, and I
will give you a check for the total amount, and you can
give me the deed of that property.^

“The proposition, so fair, and so much more than Mr.
Coster expected, was accepted at once. Mr. Coster im-
mediately made his arrangements to build the house —
palace it was — ^No. 517 Broadway. There he lived until
he died. Then it was rented to the famous Chinese Mu-
seum, brought from Canton here. The house was finally
called the Chinese building, and still stands, a portion
of it let to model artists, or some similar amusement, that
would horrify the worthy old gentleman could he retiurn
from the spirit world.

“Between the house of Mr. Astor at 223 and of Coster,
227, lived at 225 the celebrated David Lydig. I do not
know what price Mr. Astor paid him. He moved out of
the house preparatory to its being torn down in 1830, to
No. 34 Laight Street, and there he lived until he died in
1840. . . . In 219, old Michael Pajff had his celebrated
picture gallery. Who among old New Yorkers does not
remember the famous ‘Old Paff’?”

There’s humor for you, emerging all unconsciously out
of the musty past! Coster’s palace at 517 Broadway, “the
famous Chinese Museum,” which New Yorkers of today
have never heard of — ^unless they happen to be addicted
to Valentine’s Manual. And who among “old New York-
ers” Joffs remember Michael Paff and his “celebrated
picture gallery?” Gone! Gone, the lot of ’em. Wealth
and ease and culture, great names, great distinction. Re-
spected and envied for a moment, then the homes that
sheltered them furnishing dubious shelter to “model ar-
tists” and their wares. And all that’s left today is the
shadow of their names. Costers on Park Avenue, to be

THE LANDLORD OF NEW YORK 277

surej but not even a memory of ^‘old Michael PafiF,” who
was a gay and stately buck when Canal Street was “up-
town.”

“Walter Barrett” was ignorant of another version of
the deal with Coster, who, by the way, was one of the five
wealthiest men in the dty at this time. According to this
story, Coster refused to sell on the ground that his wife
didn’t want to leave their house, with all its memories 5
but after Astor had argued with him a while, pointing out
that he must have the lot to round out his plans. Coster
finally said: ‘Well, Astor, you’d better stop around and
talk to Mrs. Coster, yourself.” Astor accepted, and reit-
erated his argument to her, adding that he was willing to
let her and her husband fix their own price. She snapped
up the ofFer with a promptness which must have amused
him — “Very well, Mr. Astor, we are such old friends
that I’m willing to part with the house for your sake.”
The price he paid was $60,000, from two to three times
what the property was worth at a fair premium!

Once the blockfront had been acquired Astor’s driving-
power sped the work. Demolition was finished in a month,
and the corner-stone was laid, with formal ceremonies, on
July 4. From then on the building rose rapidly, a solid,
towering heap of bricks and masonry, constructed with
the permanence of the Old World. It was, in truth, as
Hone had written, a veritable Palais Royaly the most lux-
urious building of its kind on the continent, and inferior
to no hostelry in Europe. It was opened as the Park
Hotel, but the public commonly referred to it as “Mr.
Astor’s house” and “Astor’s Hotel,” so that presently the
name was changed to that by which it became famous.

A few days after it had been completed, Astor stood with
William across the way in City Hall Park — ^which then
stretched downtown to the peak now occupied by the
atrocious old Post Office Building — admiring this product
of his commercial genius. “What do you think of it,
William?” he asked. “It’s a splendid building, father,”

278 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

answered the son. The old man let his eyes wander lov-
ingly again over the massive grey fagade, the innumerable
flashing windows, the bristle o£ chimneypots above the
roof. ‘‘Well, William, it’s yours,” he said mildly. It was
conveyed from father to son for “one Spanish milled dol-
lar, and love and affection.”

William Astor lived at this time in a house on the
“unfashionable side of Broadway below Canal Street,”
and after the demolition of 223 Broadway, Jacob followed
his son uptown. The new house the fur merchant built was
on the fashionable east side of Broadway, however, be-
tween Prince and Spring Streets, and behind it, on Prince
Street, he erected likewise a one-story office building of
masonry, with barred windows, which became the head-
quarters of all the Astor interests. Through the uncur-
tained windows passersby might see “the richest man in
America” bending over his desk, as absorbed in the papers
occupying his attention as a young clerk.

William, of course, was relieving him of details; but
the final word on any matter of importance must come
from the father, whose devotion to the minutiae of busi-
ness required him to master the intricacies of every proposi-
tion even after William had reviewed it and expressed
general satisfaction. William, I might add, had become
a rich man on his own account, probably second only to his,
father. Old butcher Heinrich had died in 1831,^ and left
his nephew half a million made out of the profits of that
butcher-stall in the Fly Market; and William had prof-
ited, too, by every opening his father had given him.
Fur and tea, plus Heinrich’s savings and as keen an eye
for real estate as Jacob’s, had netted William $5,000,000

^Heinrich was as much of a character as his brother. Denied chil-
dren of their own, he and his wife adopted several poor young girls,
educated them, provided them jointures and saw that they secured good
marriages. One, Eliza Astor, who must have been named for the unfor-
tunate £ame of Eleazar Farmly, married Constant, a rich oil merchant.

OFFK'B rtv THE MEUOKl't^STKEET.

FltlNf'E «THEfcT, IHTWEFN BUKAHW A\ A'H

The HEAD<iUA..rERS of All the Astoe Interests in the
1 HE ns Astor

THE LANDLORD OF NEW YORK 279

long prior to Jacob’s departure from the scene — some
compensation for inability to woo the Muses.

Father and son were all-powerful in the world of
finance. Their withdrawal from active participation in the
fur trade and overseas commerce left them with relatively
unlimited resources available for the opportunities for
liquid capital which were frequent during the concluding
years of Jackson’s Administration. While there are no
definite figures to go upon, it seems likely from internal
evidence that the Astor wealth was doubled in the period
between Jacob’s return from Europe and his death in
1848. Stephen Girard, of Philadelphia, had died in 1831,
leaving $10,000,000 — all of it to the undenominational
college which bears his name, the greatest philanthropy
the country was to know for many years — and certainly,
Astor’s fortune was regarded as no greater than Girard’s,
if, indeed, it approximated the Swiss emigrant’s. But be-
fore long the Astor millions had outrun Girard’s, an
achievement for which there were two separate, yet inter-
linking, causes: the immense growth of New York, brought
on by the traffic poming in from the West over the Erie
Canal and the railroads which began to be builtj and the
merciless effidency with which the Astors exploited the
misfortunes of others.

New York City grew from a population of 123,700
in 1820 — ^less than 150,000 in 1825, the year Governor
Clinton wedded the Lakes to the Adantic — ^to 515,300 in
1850. Property values rose from $83,070,000 in 1824 to
$286,080,000 in 1850. In the ’30’s the growth came
more or less naturally from spontaneous national causes}
but ten years later a great wave of European emigration
set in, impelled by living conditions infinitely worse than
the miseries urging American families to leave the Eastern
states for the West beyond the Indian frontier. Sixty
thoxisand immigrants landed in New York in 1843, 12.9,-
000 in 1847, and under the impetus of the dreadful Irish
famine the stupendous total of 300,000 came in 1848. All

28o

JOHN JACOB AST OR

too many of these people, mostly Irish and Germans,
lacked the means to travel farther, and added their feck-
less thousands to the population of the hideous slums
which centered around the Five Points, slums which
rapidly surpassed in depravity the stews of London and
Paris. The story is told in the population figures. The city
required twenty years to grow from the 127,000 of 1820
to 3 1 7,000 in 1 84-0} but in the single decade between 1 840
and 1850 it increased by 198,000 to a total of 515,000.

Inevitably, and despite prevailing hard times, owners
of real estate reaped the profit of such a growth} and no
family in the city could have matched the money the
Astors were taking in. Jacob and William profited, not
alone by their rentals, but by the purchases they were able
to make at bargain prices, first, in an era of national de-
pression, and later, when over-extension and the influx of
cheap alien labor made difficulties for property-owners
who were either unwise or deficient in capital. Their
profits during the Panic of 1837, the worst the country’s
loose-hung credit machinery had known, were indicated
in an article, “Reminiscences of John Jacob Astor,” pub-
lished in the New York Herald of March 31, 1848, after
Jacob’s death:

“He added immensely to his riches by purchases of
State stocks, bonds, and mortgages in the financial crisis
of 1836-37. He was a willing purchaser of mortgages
from needy holders at less than their face; and when
they became due, he foreclosed on them, and purchased
the mortgaged property at the ruinous prices which ranged
at that time.”

I should hesitate to estimate his profits during the
Panic. They probably ran into the millions, for the com-
plete collapse of the banking sy^stem put practically any-
one at his mercy. Eight hundred banks suspended, refus-
ing to pay a dollar of Government deposits of $30,000,-
000 and public deposits of $120,000,000. The New York
banks, holding $5,500,000 of Government money, filled

THE LANDLORD OF NEW YORK 281

their buildings with armed guards to stand o£F the frantic
depositors and the Government’s own officers. Of the con-
sequences a Committee of the New York State Senate
reported: “Thousands of manufacturing, mercantile, and
other useful establishments in the United States have been
paralyzed or broken down by the existing crises. ... In
all our great cities numerous individuals, who, by a long
course of regular business, have acquired a competence,
have suddenly been reduced, with their families, to beg-
gary.” In the next year one-third of the manual laborers
in the city were unemployed, and 10,000 were in utter pov-
erty throughout the winter of 1837-38. The eflFect of
such conditions on the people was illustrated in the report
or. the penitentiary systems of four states — ^New York,
Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, with one-
third of the country’s population — ^by De Toqueville and
De Beaumont, which showed that, on the average, 91 per
cent of all crimes were against property. In New York the
figure was 93.5 per cent. And if the figures of another
student are to be credited, the city about this time and
for years afterward had one pauper to every 125 inhabit-
ants, and one in every 83 persons was supported at the
public expense. Yet on February 17, 1838, The Nem
Yorker complained that rents were higher than in any
other great city in the world.

Philip Hone, a man of substantial means, conserva-
tively invested, was one of hundreds of the same sort,
who suffered a shrinkage of their fortunes, which, falling
short of ruin, left them crippled, embarrassed and dis-
turbed for the rest of their lives. Few, very few, even of
the men of wealth, were in the position of Astor, who
demonstrated his resources by lending Gerrit Smith, son
of his early partner in the fur trade upstate, $250,000,
without waiting for the delivery of security, a piece of
generosity unparalleled in his career.

But the anxieties of these years exacted a price of their
own for the millions they gave him. He was never the

282 JOHN JACOB AST OR

same man again after he emerged from the nightmare of
the Panic. His weight fell off, and the skin that had been
ruddy and healthy sagged in pouches and wrinkles upon
his devastated face. No longer might he ride up Broad-
way afternoons to survey the spreading acres of his
domain. He was seventy-five, and felt itj yet he declined
to give up the fight. Life was still worth clinging to, and
he contrived to wring pleasures from it as pertinaciously as
he wrimg profits from his tenants.

As HIS physical vigor decreased, Astor turned more often
to purely intellectual diversions. Always he had possessed
a genuine fondness for men of learning, and in these lat-
ter years he delighted to gather around him a group of
familiars who included Henry Clay, Fitzgreene Halleck,
the poetj Washington Irving, Joseph Green Cogswell,
editor of The New York Review; James C. King, Henry
Brevoort, Samuel Ward — father of Julia Ward Howe,
one of whose brothers married Emily Astor, a daughter
of William; Daniel Webster, Samuel B. Ruggles, Daniel
Lord, and Peter Cooper, who, as a little boy, had plucked
the rabbitskins Astor sold his father, the hatter. In his
house on upper Broadway or on his thirteen-acre farm
overlooking Hell Gate — about where Eighty-eighth Street
and Second Avenue meet today — ^he offered a bountiful
hospitality to all whose wits could furbish up his own.
He was a good raconteur and enjoyed as much to hear
others talk as to dip down into his store of reminiscences
and entertain a genial company clustered around the ma-
hogany to crack nuts and sip prime port.

It speaks well for his personality that men who were
regarded as leaders of American life, political and liter-
ary, were eager to be with him. Irving was particularly
fond of him, establishing a basis of intimacy through the
writing of “Astoria.” This came about in the fall of
1834, when the old fur merchant was casting about for

THE LANDLORD OF NEW YORK 283

mental occupations to take his mind oflF Sarah’s death,
and approached the author of “The Sketch Book” with
the offer to place at his disposition all the letters, diaries,
journals, reports, etc., dealing with the venture. Irving
accepted the proposition, delegating to his nephew, Pierre
Irving, the preliminary task of sorting and arranging the
papers. A clue to Astor’s state of mind is conveyed in
Irving’s letter to his nephew broaching the project: “Mr.
Astor is a strong-minded man, and one from whose con-
versation much curious information can be devised. He
feels the want of occupation and amusement, and thinks
he may find something of both in the progress of the
work.”

The result was that Pierre Irving spent the winter of
1834-35 as a member of Astor’s household in the new
home on Broadway. In the summer of 1835, Washington
Irving went to visit Astor at Hell Gate, and commenced
the actual writing of the book, which occupied him nearly
a year. Of this visit the author reported:

“I have not had so quiet and delightful a rest since I
have been in America. Mr. Astor has a spacious, well-built
house, with a lawn in front of it, and a garden in the rear.
The lawn sweeps to the water’s edge, and full in front
of the house is the little strait of Hell Gate, which forms
a constantly moving picture. Here the old gentleman
keeps a kind of bachelor hall. Halleck, the poet, lives
with him, but goes to town every morning. The only other
member of the family is Charles Astor Bristed, one of
his grandchildren, a very fine boy of fourteen years of
age.”

Later, Halleck was supplanted by Cogswell, who, in
the pungent phrase of Philip Hone, became ‘‘train-bearer
and prime minister.” No man, except Jacob’s son, exerted
more impersonal influence over him than Cogswell did.
The editor was a personality} it was at his suggestion that
Astor deternained to foimd a public librapr to provide
poor young men, such as he had been, with the books

284 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

poverty had denied him. The idea had been more or less
vaguely in discussion for a long time, but it came to a
head in the spring of 1842, when Washington Irving,
recently appointed Minister to Spain, offered Cogswell
the post of secretary of legation. What followed Hone
entered in his diary:

“But Mr. Cogswell . . . does not go. Mr. Astor, who
enjoys his society, has bribed him to remain. He is willing
to pay as much for the velvet cushions on which it is his
pleasure to rest his head as the secretaryship would have
produced, and it comes in the shape of a permanent salary
to Mr. Cogswell as librarian of a great public library
which Mr. Astor has signified his intention to establish
and endow in this city, which he proposes now to antici-
pate. Cogswell wisely determines to receive his equivalent
and stay at home, write articles for The Nem York Re-
view and accompany his patron in his daily drives from
Broadway to Hell Gate. Maecenas keeps Horace with
him, and Horace knows when he has a good thing.” ^

The salary Hone mentions was $1,500 a year, together
with a “convenient office in town,” and was supplemented
with the sum of $60,000, which Cogswell was authorized
to expend for “curious, rare, and beautiful books,” an au-
thorization presently extended to include the purchase of
any suitable books. Astor also added a codicil to his will,
bequeathing $350,000 for the building and maintenance
of the library, and some time afterward, increased the
amount by $50,000. In his declining years Cogswell was
with him constantly, and a favorite diversion of the old
man was the planning of the library building — architects
were consulted, builders’ estimates were obtained, plans
were drawn j but the red-brick edifice which still stands
on Lafayette Street wasn’t completed until six years after
its founder had died.

^This entry does not appear in the published version of the Hone
Diary, the manuscript of which is in the possession of the New York
Historical Society.

THE LANDLORD OF NEW YORK 285

It was, for some years, a pleasant old age which Jacob
passed. If the sensational press assailed him for a miser
and an oppressor of the poor, he had the respect and
friendship of better-class citizens, while a large and at-
tractive family of grandchildren and great-grandchildren
amused his idle hours. His social position was as high
as anyone’s, had been so at least since William married
beautiful Margaret Armstrong, and he took a naive satis-
faction in the attentions he received at the hands of well-
known families. Society in New York was still permeated
with the aristocratic tradition of the eighteenth century 5
gentility was the vogue; the leading merchants and law-
yers were men of taste and culture; dinners were formal;
gatherings were distinguished by a courtliness reminiscent
of the days of the minuet; the Code Duelo hadn’t yet been
relegated to the South. And a gracious simplicity charac-
terized the functions at which men and women met, al-
ways in their own homes — ^the first fancy dress ball, to
which all the Astor tribe were invited, was given in 1830
by Madame Charles Brugiere, whose husband was an
emigre from Haiti, in her house at 30 Broadway, and
was the talk of the town for years to come.

The general background pleased Jacob; his ingrained
German feeling for the niceties of social intercourse was
conciliated by it. Without being at all pompous or self-
important, he enjoyed the power which had come to
him, socially as well as financially. He liked to go calling
on New Year’s Day in his yellow coach, liked the little
crowds that gathered on the icy sidewalks to watch him
come in and out, liked the murmw of comment, liked
the deference with which he was received in the firelit
parlors where the punchbowl promptly was abandoned
by young people anxious to do him honor. In his horny,
old heart there was a strange and vibrant streak of boy-
ishness. He preferred the company of young people when
he might have it, was never happy to be long^ without
them. And he was never averse to music. Julia Ward

286 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

Howe, in her “Reminiscences,” tells how he would engage
a professional pianist of an evening, and then lure a bevy
of his grandchildren and their friends to join with him
in singing the music of the day. Julia Ward, as she was
then, and her sister-in-law, lovely Emily Astor, he called
“his singing birds,” and stout and infirm though he was,
he’d stand with them by the piano and chant lustily in
chorus. He could jest and pun with the young people,
tooj he was never sedate or severe when they were with
him. Mrs. Howe remembered an occasion when she and
her sister-in-law were singing ^‘Am Rhein,” and as they
came to the line “Am Rhein, am Rhein, da wachsen unsere
Reben,” he sang it “da wachset susses Leben.”

But his acquisitiveness, his craving to continue heaping
wealth on top of that which had bent his broad shoulders
and was bending William’s lower, never left him. The
jolly, old gentleman, who tweaked a pretty girl’s ear,
tootled gayly on his flute or sang an excellent, if slightly
quavering, baritone, would next day be intent upon some
new device to increase rents or buy bonds cheap. His
eye was invariably on the point of economy. To Cogswell,
dining with him at a hotel, he growled: ^‘This man will
never succeed.“ “Why not, Mr. Astor?” “Don’t you see
what large lumps of sugar he puts in the bowl?” Another
time, walking down to a dock with his librarian-companion
to board a pilot-boat he had chartered for a sail in the
harbor, Cogswell, for devilment, figured aloud that every
minute he kept the boat cost him twenty-five cents — ^and
he broke into a worried trot. He had some glimmerings
of understanding of his own character, for he said to a
clergyman, who congratulated him upon the increased
ability to do good which great wealth brought: “Ah, sir,
but the disposition to do good does not always increase
with the means.”

A man, in many ways, to be sorry forj his worst mis-
fortune that he lived too long. At eighty he commenced

THE LANDLORD OF NEW YORK 287

to crumble, the body that had withstood innumerable hard-
ships succumbing to the dissolution of age. But his mind
remained undimmed, and the indomitable will, which had
driven him from a butcher’s hut in Wald-Dorf to mer-
cantile supremacy in the New World, refused to quit the
struggle for existence. That was the real tragedy of it.
Broken, shattered, physically a shell of tortured flesh and
bones, he 'wouldn^t die. Hadn’t he always fought for some-
thing? Food, shelter, furs, tea, real estate, wealth, power?
And now, having won a sufiiciency of all these, the one
thing left important enough to fight for was the bare
thread of mortality that lingered in his worn-out hulk.
If ever a man paid for his sins, John Jacob Astor did in
the suflFerings, the humiliations, the frustrations, of the
last five years he lived.

On October 8, 1844, Philip Hone went to dine with
Robert M. Blatchford, a prominent Whig lawyer and a
neighbor of Astor’s at Hell Gate. Next day he wrote in
his diary a pitiful account of the condition of “the richest
man in America”:

“October 9, 1844 — I went yesterday to dine at Mr.
Blatchford’s at Hell Gate. The party at dinner consisted
of old Mr. J. J. Astor and his train-bearer and prime min-
ister, Mr. Cogswell} Mr. Jaudon,’’ Ole Bull, the cele-
brated Norwegian violinist (we used to call it fiddler)}
and myself. In the evening the party were increased by
the addition of Mr. Webster, his brother-in-law, Mr.
Page, and Mr. and Mrs. Curtis. . . . Mr. Astor . . .
presented a painful example of the insufficiency of wealth
to prolong the life of man. This old gendeman, with his
fifteen millions of dollars, would give it all to have my
strength and physical ability} and yet, with all this ex-
ample ... I, with a good conscience and in possession
of my bodily faculties, sometimes repine at my lot. He
would pay all my debts if I could insure him one year of

^ Samuel Jaudon, who was cashier of the Bank of the United States.

288 JOHN JACOB ASTOR

my health and strength/ but nothing else would extort
so much from him. His life has been spent in amassing
money, and he loves it as much as ever. He sat at the din-
ner table with his head down upon his breast, saying very
little, and in a voice almost unintelligible, the saliva drop-
ping from his mouth, and a servant behind him to guide
the victuals which he was eating, and to watch him as an
infant is watched. His mind is good, his observation acute,
and he seems to know everything that is going on. But
the machinery is all broken up, and there are some people,
no doubt, who think he has lived long enough.’^

Besides a partial paralysis or palsy, he had insomnia,
and many nights Cogswell and his coachman, William,
who was a favorite servant, would sit up with him. He
usually preferred to talk on these occasions, and a fre-
quent topic, as was natural, was immortality, of which he
seemed doubtful. One night, after Cogswell had learn-
edly expounded the argximents in favor of a future life,
the old man turned upon the coachman. “William,” he
demanded sternly, “where do you expect to go when
you die?” “Why, sir,” answered William, “I always ex-
pected to go where the other people went.” It was a highly
satisfactory answer to Astor.

Toward the end he was unable to take exercise, and his
physician directed that Cogswell and William should toss
his decrepit frame in a blanket so many minutes a day.
An extraordinary prescription, which Parton in his “Life”
— a work I am disposed to eye askance — ^utilizes in an
equally extraordinary anecdote, reciting an argviment be-
tween the millionaire and a rent-collector:

“The old man cried out from the middle of his blanket:

“‘Has Mrs. Blank paid that rent yet?^

“ ‘No,’ replied the agent.

“ Well, but she must pay it,’ said the poor old man.

^ The material from this point on is not included in the published version
of the Diary.

THE LANDLORD OF NEW YORK 289

'Mr. Astor,’ rejoined the agent, 'she can’t pay it nowj
she has had misfortunes, and we must give her time.’

" 'No, no,’ said Astor j 'I tell you she can pay it, and
she will pay it. You don’t go the right way to work with
her.’

"The agent took leave, and mentioned the anxiety of
the old man with regard to this unpaid rent to his son, who
counted out the requisite sum, and told the agent to give
it to the old man, as if he had received it from the tenant.

" ‘There,’ exclaimed Mr. Astor, when he received the
money. ‘I told you that she would pay it if you went the
right way to work with her.’ ”

The mind that had conceived the first trust, that could
see New York stretching north to the Harlem, retained
a grip upon reality, despite a childish preoccupation with
the acquisitiveness which had controlled his character}
but his stomach failed entirely, and the last few weeks
of his existence — ^It scarcely deserves to be thought of as
life — he was unable to retain any food except breast-
milk. And it furnishes a key to his character that imder
such conditions he should have battled on, clinging to the
breath that animated him as he had to the millions which
soon must go to his son. It must have been a relief to
others, if not to himself, when he finally owned defeat,
not because he was willing to, but because he couldn’t
help it.

That day Philip Hone sat down to his desk, fashioned
a new quill and carefully traced what might well have
served the dead man for an epitaph:

“March 29, 1848 — ^John Jacob Astor died this morn-
ing, at nine o’clock, in the eighty-fifth year of his age}
sensible to the last, but the material of life exhausted,
the machinery worn out, the lamp extinguished for v^t
of oil. Bowed down with bodily infirmity for a long time,
he has gone at last, and left reluctantly his unbounded
wealth. His property is estimated at $20,000,OCX), some
judicious persons say $30,000,000} but, at any rate, he

290 JOHN JACOB AST OR

was the richest man in the United States in productive and
valuable property j and this immense, gigantic fortune was
the fruit of his own labor, unerring sagacity and far-seeing
penetration. He came to this country at twenty years of
agej penniless, friendless, without inheritance, without
education, and having no example before him of the art
of money-making, but with a determination to be rich,
and ability to carry it into eflFect.’’

The comfortable members of the community honestly
mourned himj in the Five Points and the bestial slums
along the waterfronts human beings who lived more
sordidly than the horses in his stable snarled exultantly
— ^the devil had got the old hunks. Those of them who
were aware that he had landed in America as penniless as
any starving Irisher from barren Donegal were disposed
to condemn him the more for having turned his back upon
his own class. A turn-coat, ould Astor. There was flaming
talk in the Bowery barsj men said there were no less
than twenty-five other millionaires in the city, nine more
o’ the bloody scuts in PhUadelphy. What was the coun-
thry cornin’ to? Well, there’d be a revolution, and to hell
wid the aristocrats. Hang ’em to their doorsteps.

The elder Bennett spoke moderately for this element
when he wrote in T he Herald, April 5 :

“We give in our columns an authentic copy of one of
the greatest curiosities of the age — ^the will of John Jacob
Astor, disposing of property amounting to about twenty
million dollars, among his various descendants of the first,
second, third, and fourth degrees. . . . If we had been
an associate of John Jacob Astor . . . the first idea that
we should have put into his head would have been that
one-half of his immense property — ^ten millions, at least —
belongs to the people of the dty of New York. During the
last fifty years of the life of John Jacob Astor, his prop-
erty had been augmented and increased in value by the
aggregate intelligence, industry, enterprise, and commerce
of New York, f^ly to the amoimt of one-half its value.

THE LANDLORD OF NEW YORK 291

The farms and lots of ground which he bought forty,
twenty, and ten and five years ago, have all increased in
value entirely by the industry of the citizens of New
York. Of course, it is plain as that two and two make four,
that the half of his immense estate, in its actual value,
has accrued to him by the industry of the community.”

That would never be considered radical doctrine today,
and in light of the modern rich American’s conception of
his social obligations Astor’s bequests were undeniably
slim — ^besides the $460,000 for the Library, they included
$50,000 to found a poorhouse in Wald-Dorfj $30,000
to the German Society of New York to be used in helping
immigrants} $30,000 to the Home for Aged Ladies, and
minor gifts to the Blind Asylum, Half-orphan Asylum,
and German Reformed Church — ^but they did constitute
recognition of a measure of responsibility to the commu-
nity. Very few public behests up to that time had exceeded
them in amount, although the striking exception of Girard
— ^who, it must be remembered, was childless and left no
immediate family — ^was dted by Horace Mann in a bit-
ter denunciation of Astor contained in the publicist’s
“Thoughts for a Young Man.” Mann drew a hot and in-
temperate reply from Astor’s grandson, that young Bris-
ted, Irving had met and liked on his visit to Hell Gate.

“Girard,” Bristed argued, “left the greater part of his
fortune to establish a college for orphans, into which no
minister of any religious denomination was ever to set
foot . . . which always struck me as a very ingenious
diabolical contrivance for the increase of knowledge with-
out virtue.” Mann had asserted that Astor left but one-
sixteenth of his fortime for public purposes, and upon
this Bristed commented that his grandfather really had
left, according to the executors, “a little less than $8,-
000,000.” The youngster meant well, and he should have
known what he was talking about} but the available facts
were all against him. It has always been t5q)ical of the
Astor strain to resent criticism and to regard their inter-

292 JOHN JACOB AST OR

ests as aloof from those of the public. Long years after
John Jacob and William and young Bristed were
William Waldorf Astor, who deserted his country and
bought a British peerage, tried to excuse himself in print
by quoting his father as saying of the hostile comments
upon the founder of their fortune:

“It is enough to make one wish to abandon such a
country.”

But hostile criticism, no more than stones and bullets,
would have persuaded old John Jacob Astor to “abandon
such a country.” He didn’t concern himself over-much
with what other people thought of him. An arrant indi-
vidualist, selfish, narrow-minded, quite blandly anti-
social, he went after whatever he sought and took it by
fair means or foul — and whoever didn’t like it was wel-
come to a battle. There was something bafflingly attrac-
tive about him. He was surely the essence of humanity,
contradictory in disposition, a whimsical blend of faults
and virtues, capable at the same time of the loftiest affec-
tion and the pettiest meanness. In his features you might
trace meditation, courage, and masterful resolve — ^and
coldness, indifference, and acquisitiveness. But never
brutality, intolerance, or stupidity. In the final analysis,
he was simply the product of a period and an environment.
On the life of America he had an influence almost in-
^culable, vastly greater, probably, than most of the rant-
ing politicians whose absurdities are still quoted in party
platforms — ^he was the first man to say: “The first hun-
dred thousand — ^that was hard to get, but afterwards it
was easy to make more.” And add this for him: At his
most detestable, he was no hypocrite, but rather his own
worst enemy, prey to a moral blindness which was instinc-
tive rather than reasoned. How he would have hated him-
self had he been able to view some of his acts objectively,
as we can, through the perspective of time!

INDEX

Albatross, I79 «

Alcohol, in Fur Trade, 213 et seq.
American Fur Co., 134, 136. 139> I4ij
193 et seq., 200, 201, 202, 211 et
seq., 216, 217, 218, 219 et seq., 232,
235, 236, 24I, 242, 243, 245, 247,
248, 250, 251

Armstrong, Margaret, 120, 285
Ashley, TOlham Henry, of Ashley-
Henry Outfit, 203-204, 2oJ, 206,
219

Astor, Catherine, It
Astor, Dorothea, 58, too
Astor, Elira, 58, 120, 267 et seq.

Astor, George Peter, 17, 24, 75j 77.

118

Astor, Heinrich, 13, 14. \5> ^7. 19.

28,34,42.46,47.56,62,76.178
Astor, John Jacob, 16, 18, 21, 22, 29,
30, 31, 33. 34, 35, 39. 4°, 4l. 4l. 4®.
47. 48. 53, 61, 70, 75, 88, 94, 97, jo ,
los, no, 113, 117, 110, ^33.

137, 143, 149, 151. ^54, 169, 170 ®
seq., 185, 186, 187, 189, 193, 196,
198, 199. i°°. ^31, 134. 1^. ^3.
246, 247, 248, OSS et seq., 267, 269,
270, 271, 272, 273, 274 et seq., 279,
280, 281, 282 et seq.

Astor, Mrs. John Jacob (Sarah Toddj.
30, 34, 36, 39. 44, 55, 58, 71, 75, 79,
82, 102, 118, 120, 246, 268, 269,
170, 272 ^

Astor, John Jacob, the elder, 13, i .
17, 18, 118

Astor, John Jacob, 3rd, 58
Astor, John Melchiov, 17. ^*8
Astor, Magdalen, 44, 120
Astor WilUam Backhouse, 58, “o.
1 20, 209, 210, 224, 232, 266, 27J>

277, 278, 179, 180, 285

Astor, WiUiam Waldorf, (ist Baron),

134, 158, 191

Astor & Broadwood, 17, 25, 47. 77

Astor & Son, 125
Astor fortune, 266, 289
Astor House, 272, 274, 175. 176, 277,
278

Astor Library, 283, 284

Astor Will, 290, 291

Astoria, 17, 114, I16, 141. 14°. *49.

163, i6s, 186, 193. 194
“Astoria,” 130. 178, 206

“Barrett, Walter,” 72, 74, 95, *04,
275, 276, 277

Beavir, 97,’ no, 1X3, too, 167, 168, 170,
172, *73. *79
Bent, Charles, 227
Bent, George, 227
Bent, William, 227, 228

Bent’s Fort, 227

Bent,St.Vrain&Co.,227,228

Bentzen, Adrian, 120

Bernard, Pratte& Co., 219,232

Bicknell, Capt. WiUiam, 208, 209
Boit, Captain John, Jr., 9*

Bonneville, Capt. Benjamin L. L.,

239. 242. 243

Boone, Daniel, 53, 13*. *55
Bradbury, John, 153
Brevoorts, 30, 34, 46, 282
Bridget, Jim, 53, loi, 212, 231, 239,

244, 25*

Bristed, Charles Astor, 283, 291
Bristed, Rev. John, 120
Browne, Robert, 31, 33, 34, 3°, 4*
BuU’s Head Tavern, 29, 42
Burr, Aaron, 98, 259, 260, 261, 262,
263, 264

CampbeU, Robert, 244, 24S
Carson, Kit, S3, 209, 226, 228, 236,
245

Cass, Gov. Lewis, 201, 213, ai6, 219
Chambers, Col. Talbot, 200

293

INDEX

294

Chouteau, Pierre, Jr., 203, 211, 215,
221, 232, 235, 247, 248, 250
Clarke, John, 167, 174 et seq. 184, 185
Cogswell, Joseph Green, 282, 283, 284,
286, 287, 288
Colter, John, 155, 156
Columbia^ 90, 107
Columbia Fur Co., 219, 220
Cooper, Peter, 48
Cosine Farm, 258
Cowman, Captain, 118
Crooks, Ramsey, 150, 153, 160, 162,
168, 200, 203, 235, 247, 248

D’Astorg, Jean Jacques, 16
De Peyster, Captain Augustus, 116
Derby, Elias Hashet, 86
De Voes' Market Book, 29
Diederick, George, 29
Dorion, Pierre, 153, 162
Dorion’s Squaw, 158, 161, 185, 186
Drips, Andy, 233, 235, 236, 242

East India House, 78, 83, 94, 136
Eberhard, Anna Margaretha, 16
Eckford, Henry, 97, 109
Eden Farm, 258
Ehninger, George, 71

Fitzpatrick, Tom, 205, 231, 235, 236,
243> 244

Fitzpatrick, Sublette & Bridger, 244,
245, 248, 249

Flatheads, delegation from, 240, 241
Fontenelle, Lucien, 233, 235, 242
Fraeb, or Frapp, Henry, 23!, 243, 244
French Fur Co., 220
Fur Trade, 26, 97, 100, 114, 126, 131,
193 et seq., 209, 210 et seq., 219, 224

Gallatin, Albert, 116, 187, 188, 198
Galloway, Captain, no
Gaut & Blackwell, 235 et seq.
Gervais, Jean Baptiste, 231, 243, 244
Girard, Stephen, 121, 135, 279, 291
Gray, Captain Robert, 90
Gregg, Josiah, 239

Henry, Alexander, 49

Henry, Maj. Andrew, of Ashley-
Henry Outfit, 159, 204, 205, 206

Hone, Philip, 62, 74, 100, 210, 272,
274, 281, 283, 284, 287, 288, 289,
290

Howe, Julia Ward, 285, 286

Hudson’s Bay Co., 26, 132, 144, ig6,
202, 203, 205 et seq., 214, 220, 240,
248, 249

Hunt, Wilson Price, 137, 139, 148,
156, 160, 162, 163, 167, 179, 181 et
seq.

Irving, Washington, 130, 157, 242,
248, 282, 283

Irwin, Matthew, U. S. Factor, 198

Jackson, David E., 225, 229, 230, 231

Jay’s Treaty, 59

Jeune, Valentine, 18, 19, 21, 22, 40

Kendrick, Captain John, 90, 96

Lady Washington^ 90, 96, 107
Langdon, Walter, X20
Lark^ 1 14, 172, 1 81
Ledyard, John, 89
Leclerc, Narcisse, 220, 221
Lisa, Manuel, 136, 151, 153, 156, 159,
203, 219

Livermore, James, 80, 88, 93, 95
Lords of the Lakes & Forests, or “Les
Seigneurs des Lacs et Forets,” 35,

4L54

Loudon, Samuel, 33

McDougal, Donald, 137, 139, 142,
146, 147, 149, 162, 163, 165, 166,
175 et seq., 181 et seq.

McGill vray, Simon, 157
McKay, 137, I39, 146, 164
Mackezie, Sir Alexander, 132
McKenzie, Donald, 137, 139, 149, 160,
162, 167, 174 et seq., 184, 185
McLoughlin, Dr. John, 24 1, 242
McTavish, Northwest Company part-
ner, 174 et seq., 181 et seq.
Madison, President, 171
Magee, James, 86

INDEX

Michilimackinac or Mackinaw Co.,

132, 138, 150, 152

Miller, Joseph, 152, 159
Missouri Fur Co., 136, 151, 153, 203,
204, 205, 206, 208, 219
Morris Case, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265
Mortier Lease, 259, 260

New York, 28, 34, 41, 58, 61, 62, 70,
72, 73, 74, 97, 98, 108, 109, 255,
256, 279, 280, 281, 285
New York Herald, 280, 290, 291
North American Fur Co. (see Amer-
ican Fur Co.)

Northwest Co., 131, 132, 136, 138,
142, 143, 148, 157, 165, 170, 173,
174 et seq., 181 et seq., 186, 187,
202, 205

North West Trade, 89 et seq.

Nuttall, Thomas, 153

Oregon, 130, 134, 187 et seq., 205, 207,
240, 241, 248, 249

Pacific Fur Co., 137, 141, 143, 150,
170, 182, 194
Paff, Michael, 47, 276
Panic of 1837, 280, 281
Parmly, Eleazar, 267 et seq., 274
Pedler, Brig, 181, 184, 185
Permit No. 68, 79, 82, 88, 93, 96
Pessenger, Dorothy, 28, 34, 46
Pessenger, John, 28
Pierre’s Hole Fight, 236, 237
Porter, Capt. David, 180 et seq.
Pratte, Chouteau & Co., (successors of
American Fur Co. in Far West),
247, 248, 251

Prime, Natlianiel, 42, 76, I2i

Raccoon, sloop-of-war, 181, 183
Real Estate Investments, 47, 48, 255,
256, 258, 259 et seq., 265, 266, 267
Recovery, 103
Reed, John, 167 et seq.

Robbins, John, loi, I2X
Robidoux, Antoine, 228, 229
Robidoux, Joseph, 228
Robidoux, Louis, 228

295

Rocky Mountain Fur Co., 231, 232,
233, 236, 237, 239, 242, 243,

244

Ropes, Captain Joseph, 102
Ross, Alexander, 166
Rumpff, Count Vincent, 120, 268,
269, 270

Russian Fur Trade, 89, 135, 139, 168,
171, 172

Sandalwood, 90, 95

Santa Fe Trail, 208, 209

Semlar Farm and ropewalk, 258, 259

Shaw, Major Samuel, 83, 85, 88

Sillimans 'Journal, 63, 246

Smith, Gerrit, 57, 281

Smith, Jed, 205, 225, 229, 230, 231,

233, 240

Smith, Jackson & Sublette, 225, 229,
231

Southwest Co., 138, 141

St. Vrain, Ceran, 227

St. Vrain, Marcelin, 227

Stenier, Rev. John Philip, i8, 19, 21,

Stone, Bostwick & Co., 219
Stout, Captain Jacob, 25
Stuart, David, 137, 139, 146, 165", 184,
185

Stuart, Robert, 137, 139, 146, r68 et
seq., I73» 200, 203

Sublette, Bill, 205, 214, 225, 230, 231,
236, 239, 244, 250

Sublette, Milton, 205, 231, 243, 244,

249

Sublette & Campbell, 244, 245, 248,

250

Taos, 209, 226, 228, 232
Tea Trade, 86, 98, 100, 104, 106, 108,
1 1 2, 1 14, 122 et seq.

The Company, (see American Fur
Co.)

The Trust (see American Fur Com-
pany).

Thompson, David, 165
Thompson & Co., 124, 125, 126
Thom, Lieut. Jonathan, 142, 145, 163
Tilton & Co. (See Columbia Fur Com-
pany)

INDEX

296

Todd, Mrs. Sarah, 30, 45
Tontine CofiFee House, 98, 14I
Tonquin, 139, I41, 149, 162, 164, i6j,
170

Union Fur G)., 251
Upper Missouri Outfit (See Columbia
Fur Company)

Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 171
Vanderburgh, 233, 235, 236, 242

Vorfelder, Maria Magdalena, 16

Waldorf, or *'Wald Dorf,” ij, 17, 22,
291

Whettin, John, 25, 30, 62
Wyeth, Nathaniel J., 236, 239, 242,
243, 248

Young, Ewing, 226
Yellowstoney 222, 239

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